Quotes About Literature

Maybe when I'm sixty-five I'll talk about my literary life.

In literature and art memory is a synonym for invention. It is the life-blood of imagination, which faints and dies when the veins are empty.

One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person.

I've been enjoying 'Life on the Mississippi' by Mark Twain that I picked up at the airport randomly. It's very witty and interesting to read about his time as a steamboat pilot.

I was desperate for something to read that dealt realistically with teenage life, and I thought others might be, too.

It's so disappointing, to put it mildly, that people know so much about my life. Because it means that they're always trying to look at my books in terms of my life.

Life without literary studies is death.

Leisure without literature is death, or rather the burial of a living man -Otium sine litteris mors est et hominis vivi sepultura

I've spoken out my whole life against the idea of simply dismissing whole areas of fiction by saying it's "genre" and therefore can't be seen as literature.

I cannot imagine life without books any more than I can imagine life without breathing.

I believe the book should be something you protect yourself from by returning to your life. But it has threatened your life. Not by saying something it believes is true, but by attacking it.

You cannot live this life anymore without the ability to read.

The hard-drinking newspaperman is, or used to be, a stock character of fiction. Now he is being phased out of literature just as he is being phased out of life.

As an adolescent, Vonnegut made my life bearable.

Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life.

Rhetoric takes no real account of the art in literature and morality takes no account of the art in life.

I wanted to drag Shakespeare from obscurity. I've been a fan my whole life.

I'm just doing what I've done my whole life, which is talking to people about books and making them read. It's what I do in my friendships. "Here, you have to read this, you have to read this."

I'd been a thriller reader all my life.

I mean, when you're tired of book reviews, you're tired of life.

A child without an acquaintance of some kind with a classic of literature ... suffers from that impoverishment for the rest of his life. No later intimacy is like that of the first.

It strikes me as somewhat odd that the people who use God's name most frequently, both in life and in literature, usually don't believe in him.

Reading civilized the inner life.

Modernism: the books are as hard to understand as life itself.