Quotes About Literature

I read 'Jaws' and 'The Godfather' back to back one summer when I was 14 and was suddenly aware of how powerful fiction could be.

'Forever Amber,' written by Kathleen Winsor in 1944, was banned in Boston at the time of its publication as obscene and offensive. This alone would have been enough to excite my interest, but in 1956, it was sitting inoffensively on the shelves of the small country library on the north shore of Oahu, Hawaii, where my family spent its summers.

Summertime, and the reading is easy... Well, maybe not easy, exactly, but July and August are hardly the months to start working your way through the works of Germanic philosophers. Save Hegel, Heidegger, and Husserl for the bleaker days of February.

I did a lot of studying of great writers. I read that Hemingway rewrote 'The Sun Also Rises' 39 times.

I think a fictional invention grows according to its own development, not the author's. Characters in fiction are not simply as alive as you and me, they are more alive. Becky Sharp, Elizabeth Bennett, and Don Quixote may not outlive the burning out of the sun, but they will certainly outlive the brief candle of our lives.

Typically, a book is published and gets one season in the sun. Eventually, you write another book, and maybe your old books get a bump, but my books seem to keep being discovered and recommended to new people of all ages.

Well, there's nothing better than putting your feet up on a Sunday afternoon and grabbing a good book.

Yeah, I think the arts and literature have always been irrevocably connected. Because if you think about it, every film script, every play, every song starts as words on the page before it is ever performed or filmed or sung.

If I wanted to be Rimbaud, what was I doing in graduate school? Trying to stay out of the army, of course. Graduate study gave me a draft deferment. But I also knew I lacked erudition and polish and was often sunk in forlorn reveries.

I'd read books in Russian, and they would take me forever. I wanted to write a book that would last and would not be superficial. Siberian-travel writing is its own genre.

In the 20th century alone, there have been 1,600 books about the circus. My adding one more would be superfluous unless I do something totally new and different.

The experience of this demoralizing crisis [of the Babylonian exile], which appeared to negate all the central elements that Yahweh had ordained for Israel's well-being, could easily have meant the end of Israel's religion. Remarkably, it provoked instead an almost explosive flowering of theological literature during the exilic period. (p. 139)

There are a large number of people in the room, but one is unaware of them. They are in the books. At times they move among the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.

Do not, do not, do not books for ever hammer at people like perpetual bells? When, between two books, silent sky appears: be glad.

Bibliothèque Nationale. Ich sitze und lese einen Dichter. Es sind viele Leute im Saal, aber man spürt sie nicht. Sie sind in den Büchern. Manchmal bewegen sie sich in den Blättern, wie Menschen, die schlafen und sich umwenden zwischen zwei Träumen.

Ich sitze und lese einen Dichter. Es sind viele Leute im Saal, aber man spürt sie nicht. Sie sind in den Büchern. Manchmal bewegen sie sich in den Blättern, wie Menschen, die schlafen und sich umwenden zwischen zwei Träumen. Ach, wie gut ist es doch, unter lesenden Menschen zu sein. Warum ist es nicht immer so?

Read as little as possible of literary criticism — such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view.

Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art - as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature.

In the room...they are inside the books. They move sometimes within the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams.

Live for a while in these books, learn from them whatever seems to you worth learning, but above all love them.

daß man nicht das Recht hatte, ein Buch aufzuschlagen, wenn man sich nicht verpflichtete, alle zu lesen

Live in these books for a while, learn from them what seems to be worth learning, but above all love them.

Who am I? But it was like trying to identify one particular cell that coursed through the torpid veins of my body. Maybe I was just this blackness and bewilderment and pain, but that seemed less like a suitable answer than something I'd read somewhere.

Literature is integrated, and I'm not just talking about color or race. I'm talking about the power of literature to make us recognize - and again and again - the wholeness of the human experience.