Quotes About Literature

I have spent a great deal of my time defending my work against those who see it as too complicated, too old in approach, too bleak to qualify as children's literature. This has been the bane of my life.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

It is often said of me - some intend it as a compliment, others as a complaint - that I write about a single subject: the Holocaust. I have no quarrel with that. Why shouldn't I accept, with certain qualifications, the place assigned to me on the shelves of libraries?

In Germany, I have been called the Queen of Kitsch, but I don't mind that - as long as people buy the books.

I think the Queen enjoyed my book on her father, George VI.

I love it when novels contain a broad cast of characters, including queer ones.

When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to.

I've been asked this question so many times, do you feel you need to write a book for adults? No, I don't need to write a book for adults.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

I have always been a writer of letters, and of long ones; so, when I first thought of writing a book in the form of letters, I knew that I could do it quickly and easily.

There is a quiet revolution going on in the study of the Bible. At its center is a growing awareness that the Bible is a work of literature and that the methods of literary scholarship are a necessary part of any complete study of the Bible.

Innocence is a pretty dangerous thing, you know. Revisit Dostoevsky's 'The Idiot' or, for that matter, Greene's 'The Quiet American' to find out how destructive it can be.

Ezekiel Boone's books, starting with 'The Hatching' series, are meant to be big, sprawling, smart, entertaining books that are fun above all else; the literary novels written under my real name, Alexi Zentner, are certainly a little more quiet.

Novels can change attitudes. Maybe we should speak quietly otherwise politicians will use novels as propaganda.

For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.

My first two novels were quirky detective stories followed by a couple of SF/Fantasy novels.

You go down South, and they're quirky; they have culture, and it's not uniformly true of our country. Our country has gotten a little blanded out, big sections of it. Even if you disagree with the politics, you have to appreciate the cuisine, the music, the literature.

Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer... in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.

What has 'The Patchwork Girl of Oz' got in its favor? Quite a lot, from our point of view in 2009. If you want to see how Oz's creator envisioned his own work, here it is.

I like Baudelaire's sentences quite a lot. I read and re-read him very often.

I'm in a position to do exactly what I want. I travel quite a lot. I read prodigiously. I go to the theater, to concerts. London is a wonderful city to live in.

I never really had any close friends in India, and I felt a terrible loneliness and isolation for many years. Westernized Indians don't like my books and I tend not to like westernized Indians - so we're quits.

A book that furnishes no quotations is no book - it is a plaything.