Quotes About Literature

Edgar Rice Burroughs taught me pace and gave me a sense of action and adventure.

I attempt to write a good novel. Whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe.

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

Whatever's good about your book should be good on page 1, or very few editors are going to get to page 2.

I collect books and I have some really, really old schoolbooks, and God is mentioned on every single page.

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.

I read a lot of scripts, so I know by page 25 if I like it or not.

Confidence is highly overrated when it comes to creating literature. A writer who is overly confident will not engage in the struggle to get it exactly right on the page - but rather, will assume that she's getting it right without the struggle.

I am influenced by books which don't have their eye on the endgame, but which try to be entertaining on each and every page.

Film can be more of a reality than a page with words can ever be.

To tell you the truth, I don't edit much at all. Most times, when I have finished the first draft, that's the book. Of course, I work on the page I am on until I am happy with it. I might even say that I try to state the landscape.

For me, the bottom line is what's on the page.

This Tourette's center sent me a package that was like 900 hundred pages.

I'd like to meet fewer people who say 'Oh, I want to write a book, here are 10 pages I've written,' and more 'Oh, I want to write a book, here are 300 pages I've written.'

In 1978, when I was 17 and in my first year at university, I read approximately 3,500 pages of Dickens.

In a way, my childhood was one long bunch of pages... I read and read and read.

It's easy to write a short story and frighten people for five pages, but to work at length, when you do it as in 'The Turn Of The Screw' or 'A Christmas Carol,' it's different; you have to build it and build it.

Beginning in middle school, the era of wide-margined, Bible-paged anthologies, short stories develop unpromising associations - and these associations often linger through college, when stories become the things distributed in Xeroxes missing entire pages of line-endings.

'Nicholas Nickleby' is 800 pages long. At one time, the theater production was 15 hours long. So it's an interesting process, about what you leave out and what you select.

I only like non-fiction. After 30 pages of fiction, I think: what nonsense are they trying to write.

I love reading any interesting book. If it is boring I keep it forever after reading 4-5 pages of it. But if it is good, I can go on reading it no matter what genre it belongs to.

Shakespeare's words paint pictures in glorious colour in my language. They were written by a man whose use of words fits exactly into Xhosa.

I arrived in the U.S. for graduate study in literature in the fall of 1986. I was twenty-three. After a year, I began to paint, even though I had come to the U.S. intending to become a writer.