Quotes About Literature

'Use Me' is a wonderfully satisfying book.

Actually, the language in Shakespeare is wonderfully musical. You need to hear the music to connect with the words.

'Family Guy'. It's not only the funniest programme on television, it's the most wonderfully, indecorously literate.

Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.

'Finnegans Wake,' 'Alice and Wonderland' and 'Through the Looking Glass' live on my bedside table back home in London.

Is 'The Wind in the Willows' a children's book? Is 'Alice in Wonderland?' Is 'Treasure Island?' These are masterpieces which we read with pleasure as children, but with how much more pleasure when we are grown-up.

There is the myth that writing books for children is easier than writing books for grownups, whereas we know that truly great books for children are works of genius, whether it's 'Alice in Wonderland' or the 'Gruffalo' or 'Northern Lights.' When it's a great book, it's a great book, whether it's for children or not.

Think of 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.' It is equally intoxicating for children and adults. All this 'crossover' talk is something publishers are using as a selling device - a kind of post hoc rationalisation of what was happening already.

When I was a child, my father would read out loud to my brother, my mother, and me. Several times in the course of my childhood, he would read 'Alice and Wonderland' and 'Through the Looking Glass' over a few weeks. They were a great favorite with all of us.

People always imagine that the whole of Victorian England was sitting around reading Alice in Wonderland - in fact only a tiny minority ever did.

I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

I'm a fan of parchment and wood pulp.

A wood carving of Quixote on his nag Rocinante graced my childhood home.

Under Milk Wood' was given to me when I was quite young, in Sydney. I didn't even know what Wales was, let alone anything about Dylan Thomas. It taught me the beginning of my love of English literature.

In high school, I went to a place called the Mountain School. It's on a farm in Vermont, and I read Emerson and Thoreau and ran around the woods. Now I go hiking with a bunch of my comedy buddies. We talk about our emotions. I also do a lot of writing on hikes, just to get the blood flowing and the ideas moving.

I don't remember how I picked up 'Different Seasons,' but it was a book I read on a grave shift. I was absolutely floored by it; 'The Body,' a story about kids who go searching for a corpse in the woods, impacted me especially.

I consider myself a Jewish writer, like all my heroes: Tom Stoppard, David Mamet, Philip Roth, Arthur Miller, Woody Allen.

'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.

I'm a bachelor in the old sense of the word, meaning I flirt, I have very many close relationships, but then I come home and like to read my book.

I don't really have a lot of hobbies. I listen to a lot of spoken word. I get books on tape.

The elegance and the quality - the talent is always in the literature. I start with the word and I base everything on that. It doesn't make any difference to me.

I try to write in plain brown blocks of American speech but occasionally set in an ancient word or a strange word just to startle the reader a little bit and to break up the monotony of the plain American cadence.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.