Quotes About Literature

Books to the ceiling, Books to the sky, My pile of books is a mile high. How I love them! How I need them! I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.

For every book you buy, you should buy the time to read it.

A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance.

My idea of a good time is creating something and reading a good book.

Literature is well enough, as a time-passer, and for the improvement and general elevation and purification of mankind, but it has no practical value.

For twenty years I read a book a day, from the time I was seven until I was twenty-seven.

Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance

I found some time ago that I have to be careful, while working on a novel, what I read.

And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.

I read poetry to save time.

Reading enables us to see with the keenest eyes, to hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time.

There is hardly a pioneer's hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.

Surprising what you can dig out of books if you read long enough, isn't it?

In books lies the soul fo the whole past time.

The most important thing... was to change their spirit; and since at that time I felt that literature was the best means to this end, I decided to promote literary movement.

The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.

Each time I see a split infinitive, an inconsistent tense structure or the unnecessary use of the passive voice, I blister.

I did not read from a sense of superiority, or advancement, or even learning. I read because I loved it more than any other activity on earth.

Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it.

Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives. [ Turning the Page: The future of reading is backlit and bright , Newsweek Magazine, March 25, 2010]

There are only two ways, really, to become a writer. One is to write. The other is to read.

Jane Austen may not be the best writer, but she certainly writes about the best people. And by that I mean people just like me.