Quotes About Literature

I used to love 'The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe,' and I can still remember listening to them before I would fall asleep. I can remember the first ten minutes of the book perfectly, but whether I knew the rest of it was slightly more dicey.

I keep waiting for someone to cast me as the angel or the witch or the immortal of some kind because so much of the reading I do for my own pleasure is fantasy, horror, or sci-fi.

My mum always said I devoured 'The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe' at the tender age of four, but frankly, I think that might be a touch of maternal exaggeration.

I've never read 'The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe,' but his later works are about whether God is real.

When I was eight I discovered 'The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe' by C S Lewis and it made me fall in love with reading.

I teach 18- to 21-year-olds - the 'Harry Potter' generation. They grew up as voracious readers, reading books in this exploding genre. But at some point, I would love for them to give Umberto Eco or A.S. Byatt a try. I hope 'A Discovery of Witches' will serve as a kind of stepping-stone.

I couldn't resist hiding some historical details and a few clues relevant to the plot and characters of 'A Discovery of Witches' throughout the pages of the novel.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

He that loves reading has everything within his reach.

Every time we moved on, I joined a different class in a different school with different girls until, aged 13, my father had taken the decision to pull me out of school altogether. Everything I needed, he reasoned, could be found within the rich language of Shakespeare's plays at which, by then, I was something of an old hand.

The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

A home without books is a body without soul.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

Where there is no human connection, there is no compassion. Without compassion, then community, commitment, loving-kindness, human understanding, and peace all shrivel. Individuals become isolated, the isolated turn cruel, and the tragic hovers in the forms of domestic and civil violence. Art and literature are antidotes to that.

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.

It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.

I cannot live without books.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

The concept of a literature of witness - of bearing witness - has embedded in it the need for action. One must not simply hide in the shadows and type; one must also stand in the light.

I like to do really good things. But 'good' - witness Charles Dickens - doesn't mean 'not popular.'

I'm also a huge cinephile, and I have witnessed that to honor the book literally word-for-word never makes a good movie.