Quotes About Literature

The hard fact is that writing is available to readers because of market factors as much as particular writing talent.

Digital distribution has widened the reading world.

We have more choice than ever before about where and how we buy and read books.

I've always felt that good writing does not have to be literary.

As it stands there is a very strong argument that as the book trade becomes increasingly corporate it's our literary heritage that is at risk - a vital part of our culture.

Are we genuinely prepared to say that working in an office building or shopping in a mall is real, while reading Tolstoy is not?

C. S. Lewis said it this way: "In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. . . . I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do."12

When was the last time you heard a long passage from a novel read aloud during Sunday school or worship? Or how about the last time a youth pastor subverted his or her "talk" through satire or parable rather than proof texting the six main points? Yet

food to nourish the imagination

She'd also liked being within a wall of books. There, she'd felt as close to safe as she could remember

I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath.

I tried reading Hilbert. Only his papers published in mathematical periodicals were available at the time. Anybody who has tried those knows they are very hard reading.

I always have kind of a few books going at the same time.

The first time I walked into a library, I got so excited I almost wet my pants.

I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time

Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report.

But I have a list of books that I want to read before I die, and whenever I get time to read something that isn't a script, I'll read something from that.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

What makes a good book? Scholars and critics have been debating that question for decades. I like books that touch my head and my heart at the same time.

Like everybody at that age, I read an awful lot of pulp fiction. But at the same time, I also read quite a bit of history and read that as much for pleasure as part of a curriculum.

Without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer.

A writer's ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years' time and for one reader in a hundred years' time.

To me, it's a great day every time I receive a letter from somebody who climbed inside one of my books, inhabited it for a while, learned a little something, and emerged grateful.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.