Quotes About Literature

In The Invention of Literature (1999), the classical scholar Florence Dupont reminds us that many of the greatest works of human imagination were created to be performed, to be heard. Before the printing press and mass literacy, the written versions existed as blueprints or records of performances, recitals, speeches, songs, and other forms of oral communication. Voicing was an art of living creators, and the voice of the storyteller was

It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.

A person who does not read, or reads little, or reads only trash, is a person with an impediment: he can speak much but he will say little, because his vocabulary is deficient in the means for self-expression. This is not only a verbal limitation. It represents also a limitation in intellect and imagination. It is a poverty of thought, for the simple reason that ideas, the concepts through which we grasp the secrets of our condition, do not exist apart from words.

Leer es protestar contra las insuficiencias de la vida

Un libro abierto es un cerebro que habla; cerrado, un amigo que espera; olvidado, un alma que perdona; destruido, un corazón que llora».

Light literature, along with light cinema and light art, give the reader and the viewer the comfortable impression that they are cultured, revolutionary, modern and in the vanguard without having to make the slightest intellectual effort. Culture that purports to be avant-garde and iconoclastic instead offers conformity in its worst forms: smugness and self-satisfaction.

Era un refugio huir allí: la vida espléndida de la ficción daba fuerzas para soportar la vida verdadera. Pero la riqueza de la literatura hacía también que la realidad real se empobreciera.

A writer is not always conscious of the influences he has received.

Because of literature we can decipher, at least partially, the hieroglyphic that existence tends to be for the great majority of human beings.

Ni siquiera tenía ánimos para concentrarse en la lectura.

Writing is a compensatory activity, and literature abounds in cases like his. Borges's pages teem with knives, crimes, and scenes of torture, but the cruelty is kept at a distance by his fine sense of irony and by the cool rationalism of his prose, which never falls into sensationalism or the purely emotional. This lends a statuesque quality to the physical horror, giving it the nature of a work of art set in an unreal world.

The symbol of a setting for a Hemingway story is a boxing ring; for Borges, a library. On the other hand I think Nabokov was a writer quite close to Borges. He had the same rich literary culture, moved with great ease in different languages and traditions, and had a playful approach to literature-literature as an intellectual game, through which, of course, the real truths could appear. But apparently the game was for Nabokov just an exercise devoid of moral substance.

Ce-mi place mie este s? citesc romanele, nu s? le fac autopsia.

De fiecare data, imi aparea tot mai clar ca unicul lucru pe care doream sa-l fac in viata era sa devin scriitor si astfel mi se intarea convingerea ca singura cale pentru a reusi este aceea de a te darui, trup si suflet, numai literaturii.

Por lo menos, confiesa que te he dado tema para una novela. ¿No, niño bueno?

The real truth is one thing, and the literary truth is another; and there is nothing more difficult than to want both truths to coincide.

One of the reasons why literature is important is that it gives us an instrument with which to understand time. In real life time is something that devours us, is something that does not give us the necessary perspective to understand how this time in which we are immersed flows; and so we do not have perspective, we do not have the necessary distance to understand really what is happening. Therefore, we need artificial order for understanding time.

Io le spiegai che l'amore non esisteva, che era un'invenzione di un italiano chiamato Petrarca e dei trovatori provenzali. Che quanto la gente credeva un cristallino fiotto dell'emozione, una pura effusione del sentimento era il desiderio istintivo dei gatti in calore celato dietro le belle parole e i miti della letteratura.

manifiesta una constante sentimental de Flaubert: amar a mujeres mayores (sus tres amantes le llevaron varios años: Eulalie Foucaud, Elisa Schlésinger y Louise Colet).

Desvarío empobrecedor el de querer escribir novelas, el de querer explayar en quinientas páginas algo que se puede formular en una sola frase».

La vocación literaria no es un pasatiempo, un deporte, un juego refinado que se practica en los ratos de ocio. Es una dedicación exclusiva y excluyente, una prioridad a la que nada puede anteponerse, una servidumbre libremente elegida que hace de sus víctimas (de sus dichosas victimas) unos esclavos.

que la crítica y la alta cultura. ¿Por qué? Porque el erotismo, que convierte el acto sexual en obra de arte, en un ritual al que la literatura, las artes plásticas, la música y una refinada sensibilidad impregnan de imágenes de elevado virtuosismo estético, es la negación misma de ese sexo fácil, expeditivo y promiscuo

Mario Vargas Llosa

No era el deseo de aprender, de triunfar, lo que te confinaba en la biblioteca, sino de marearte, intoxicarte, perderte en esas materias —ciencias o letras, daba igual— para no pensar, para ahuyentar los recuerdos dominicanos. —Pero