Quotes About Literature

The short-story writer knows that he can't proceed cumulatively, that time is not his ally. His only solution is to work vertically, heading up or down in literary space.

I think that the best literature has a core that you can't lock to a time or place but that can generate lots of meanings and translations.

I can never leave a bookstore without buying a book. I read four or five at a time.

That a literature in our time is living is shown in that way that it debates problems.

How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.

William Packard surely must be one of the great editors of our time.

I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy.

I forget whether advice be among the lost things which Ariosto says are to be found in the moon: that and time ought to have been there.

In our fathers' time nothing was read but books of feigned chivalry, wherein a man by reading should be led to none other end, but only to manslaughter and bawdry.

Yeats was the greatest poet of our times . . . certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language.

A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time.

For works of the mind really great there is no old age, no decrepitude. It is inconceivable that a time should come when Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, should not ring in the ears of civilized man.

The sun burnt every day. It burnt time.

When I read Dickens for the first time, I thought he was Jewish, because he wrote about oppression and bigotry, all the things that my father talked about.

Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible.

Dickens is a very underrated writer at the moment. Everyone in his time admired him but I think right now he's not spoken of enough.

I spend a lot of time writing. I get inspiration from texts rather than images.

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.

I remember being in the public library and my jaw just aching as I looked around at all those books I wanted to read. There just wasn't time enough to read everything I wanted to read.

I wasn't always such a great fan of Shakespeare, mind you. I can guess we all at one time had it rammed down our necks at school, which tends to take the edge off it.

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don't read a book out of its right time for you.

There is no proper time and place for reading. When the mood for reading comes, one can read anywhere

Good translations are one of the vital necessities of our time.