Quotes About Literature

Thomas Mann was a prodigy of production. Working full time, he wrote a page a day. That is 365 pages a year, for he did write every day—a good-sized book a year. At a page a day, he was one of the most prolific literary writers who ever lived.

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is... what he will know.

I started to make a literary being of myself, someone who lives as if her experiences were to be written down someday.

T]here is no separate, no relative world of literature. There is simply the world, with its infinite possibilities of representation.

Books were not an expense; they were an investment.

One day, I'll sit down with all my books around me, and just start reading.

Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London is invaluable. As is Nicolas Freleng's The Kitchen, David Blum's Flash in the Pan, the Batterberrys' fine account of American restaurant history, On the Town in New York, and Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel.

There is only one kind of immorality in fiction, and that is when you write badly.

There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.

But this one was a writer, not a reader.

You've sinned, I suppose, but your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good. And I see that clearly - that business about marginal conditionings. Music and the sexual act, literature and art, all must be a source now not of pleasure but of pain.

A Clockwork Orange is too didactic to be artistic. It is not the novelist's job to preach; it is his job to show.

I can't accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias.

There's the mackerel of the cornflake for you, you dirty reader of filth and nastiness.

I see you have books under your arm, brother. It is indeed a rare pleasure these days to come across somebody that still reads, brother.

Literature is the aesthetic exploitation of language

I like nothing better in this world than a good clean book, brother.

Even trashy bestsellers show people changing. When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of the field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory.

you are out of the field of the novel

Toplumun onaylad??? eylemlerin d???na ç?kam?yorsun, sadece iyilik yapabilen küçük bir makinesin. Ayr?ca ÅŸu marjinal koÅŸullanmalar meselesinin… içyüzünü aç?kça görüyorum. Müzik ve cinsellik, edebiyat ve sanat, art?k bunlar haz deÄŸil ac? veriyordur herhalde. (syf. 136 – 137)

If Shakespeare required a word and had not met it in civilised discourse, he unhesitatingly made it up.

I see you have them books under your arm, brother. It is indeed a rare pleasure these days to come across someone who still reads, brother.

Besame los yarblocos- El lerdo

Bugünlerde kitap okuyan birini görmek gerçekten göz yaÅŸart?c?.