Quotes About Literature

Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.

All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.

An anguishing book offers anguished people a homeopathy of anguish.

A great verse can have a great influence on the soul of a language.

Le presbytère n'a rien perdu de son charme, ni le jardin de son éclat.

When we seem to have won or lost in terms of certainties, we must, as literature teachers in the classroom, remember such warnings -- let literature teach us that there are no certainties, that the process is open, and that it may be altogether salutary that it is so.

The same authorities who insist upon beginnings, middles, and ends, declare that Great Literature (by which they mean the stories they have been taught to admire) is about love and death, while mere popular fiction like this is about sex and violence. One reader's sex, alas, is another's love; and one's violence, another's death.

If educated men have sometimes thought me, if not their equal, at least one whose company did not shame them, that is owing solely to Thecla: the Thecla I remember, the Thecla who lives in me, and the four books.

Walker Evans said it was 'a pet subject' of his — how writers like James Joyce and Henry James were 'unconscious photographers'.

Go litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye, Ther God thi makere yet, er that he dye, So sende myght to make in som comedye! But litel book, no makyng thow n'envie, But subgit be to alle poesye; And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.

Having to read a footnote resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.

Here is ended the Prioress's Tale.

Todo lo que se escribe, se escribe para nuestra enseñanza.»

He had more tow on his distaff Than Gerveis knew.

Brimful of pardons come from Rome, all hot. He had the same small voice a goat has got

The literature favoured by the military aristocracy of the fifteenth century was not that of the traditional chivalric background but, rather, one based upon a growing appreciation of the military values of Rome (in particular) and of what these had to offer.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read. [As quoted in Literary Censorship in England (in Current Opinion , Vol. 55, No. 5, November 1913)]

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.

Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty.

My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.

I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

All classes in proportion to their lack of travel and familiarity with foreign literature are bellicose, prejudiced against foreigners, fond of fighting as a cruel sport -- in short, dog-like in their notions of foreign policy. [Quoted in Socialism and Foreign Policy and War and the Liberal Conscience ]

I find it easy to forgive the man who invented a devilish instrument like dynamite, but how can one ever forgive the diabolical mind that invented the Nobel Prize in Literature?