Quotes About Literature

If we were more careful not to teach our children to read in their childhood we should not be so anxious about the effects of pernicious literature upon their adolescent morals.

Taking the alphabet first and learning one letter a year for twenty-six years he will be able to read and write as early in life as he ought to. If we were more careful not to teach our children to read in their childhood we should not be so anxious about the effects of pernicious literature upon their adolescent morals.

I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.

I am part of all that I have read.

vellichor n. the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you'll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.

The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.

More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.

Isn't post-modernism really one big cover-up for the failure of the French to write a truly interesting novel ever since a sports car ate Albert Camus ?

Books are where we go alone to complicate ourselves. Inside this solitude, we take on contours, textures, perspectives. Heightened language levitates the reader. Great art transfigures. And when we go back to it, it's full of even more surprises. We get older; it gets smarter.

Everybody is forever saying that the essay is dead. This is always said in essays.

Max Byrd's Grant.

To be able to turn at will, in a book of your own, to those passages which count for you, is to have your wealth at instant command, and your books become a record of your intellectual adventures...

J. M. Barrie founded a celebrity cricket team with Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, Jerome K. Jerome, G. K. Chesterton, A. A. Milne, Rudyard Kipling and P. G. Wodehouse.

James Joyce married a woman named Nora Barnacle. She once said to him, 'Why don't you write books people can read?

The Wars of the Roses weren't called that. Sir Walter Scott invented the name four centuries after the conflict.

You have a lot to learn, young man. Philosophy. Theology. Literature. Poetry. Drama. History. Archeology. Anthropology. Mythology. Music. These are your tools as much as brush and pigment. You cannot be an artist until you are civilized. You cannot be civilized until you learn. To be civilized is to know where you belong in the continuum of our art and your world. To surmount the past, you must know the past.

Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it has become the amusement and delight of the few.

You're never alone with a Strand.

When I start to write, words have become physical presence. It was to see if I could bring that private world to life that found its first expression through reading. I really dislike the romantic notion of the artist.

Without the book business it would be difficult or impossible for true books to find their true readers and without that solitary (and potentially subversive) alone with a book the whole razzmatazz of prizes, banquets, television spectaculars, bestseller lists, even literature courses, editors and authors, are all worthless. Unless a book finds lovers among those solitary readers, it will not live . . . or live for long.

A local butcher offered me money to put in my next book a portrayal of a customer he didn't like that would make him ashamed to show his face in the town. It was like the tradition of the Gaelic poets, who were paid money to write in derision about people.

I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.

If it's well written, even an obscene book cannot be immoral. John McGahern, Galway, October 6th 2003. "Acclaimed as the most important Irish novellist since James Joyce.

There's a very interesting thing that Scott Fitzgerald said [about creating characters], 'If you start with a person, you end up with a type, but if you start with a type you wind up with nothing.' You set out to discover something in your writing and it is through the attempt to discover that you reflect. If you have your mind made up about something you'll reflect nothing.