Quotes About Literature

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

ESSAY -- A loose sally of the mind an irregular indigested piece not a regular and orderly composition.

A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth is not.

Definition of a classic something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

also wish to express my thanks to the Department of Antiquities of the Republic of Turkey and to the Director of the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul for generously making it possible for me to utilize the Sumerian literary tablets in the Istanbul Museum of the Ancient Orient. To the two curators of the tablet collection of this museum, Muazzez cik and Hatice Kizilyay, I am particularly

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen.

Egész nap orvosságot szedtem, és Isten ne vegye b?nömül, holmi francia regények olvasásával mulattam magam.

What we need is not so much radical writers as we need radical readers!

To the extent that the short story is an art, Sturgeon is the American short-story writer.

When I was packing those, I caught myself taking all the important, profound, and indispensable titles I could – nearly filled the box. But one of the more eccentric librarians at the internment compound I'd gotten permission to riffle had put up a whole shelf full of cubes of women writers or texts about women. She was convinced nobody could be truly educated unless they'd read them – though nobody I ever met had, except her, maybe. […]

Here one page, possibly two, is missing.

Books kept connecting with books. That is what made them live…

It is not that female characters in the modern novel are characterizations of bad or limited people—although, incidentally, they almost always are—but that they are badly drawn, because the writers flatly refuse to apply the same complex of literary artifice in their character realizations to both males and females—out of habits that begin as a response to some terror that human individuation would make the female characters equal to the males.

The history of science fiction tends to be the history of its editors.

Poetry is what is avoided as it is surrounded by translation.

When a new book is published, read an old one.

Thomas B. Costain, Herman Wouk, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Kenneth Roberts, Edna Ferber, Sholem Asch, Ben Ames Williams, Frederic Wakeman, Frances Parkinson Keyes, Irwin Shaw, Budd Schulberg, Hamilton Basso, and, of course, Samuel Shellabarger.

Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar, in point of style.

Never pursue literature as a trade.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, etc., if they could; they have tried their talents at one or the other, and have failed; therefore they turn critics.

The book of Job is pure Arab poetry of the highest and most antique cast.

Trochee trips from long to short;From long to long in solemn sortSlow Spondee stalks.