Quotes About Literature

three gift copies of The Perennial Bachelor

While he was bored by free verse and cubism, he thought rather well of Dreiser, Cabell, and so much of Proust as he had rather laboriously mastered.

If in 100 years I am only known as the man who invented Sherlock Holmes then I will have considered my life a failure.

Sweet food of sweetly uttered knowledge

Books, in all their variety, offer the human intellect the means whereby civilization may be carried triumphantly forward.

Readers are HAPPY people!

What I have never witnessed is a writer's work succeeding notably in a field he doesn't habitually read for pleasure.

Tension produces instantaneous anxiety, and the reader finds it delicious.

In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, in Australia you have to explain what a writer is.

How to Be Parisian at the English bookstore on

Books are educational; so you can buy as many as you want. Sophie Kinsella, shopping at the Limelight Marketplace

Oh, please. If she's going to use Mr. Darcy to prop up her arguments, I give up.

The writer] can easily foresee his fate ... in an age when an author who wants to have readers must take care to write in such a way that the book can easily be perused during an afternoon nap ....

Where the novel makes use of material from my life it does so because it's aesthetically convenient, not because of any allegiance it has to any verifiable facts.

To my way of thinking and working, the greatest service a piece of fiction can do any reader is to force him to lay it down with a higher ideal of life than he had when he took it up.

I'm reading Barnaby Rudge, one of the less well-known Dickens novels. I've been a life-long lover of Charles Dickens ever since I think A Tale of Two Cities was the first Dickens novel I read.

Every writer knows that when you're imitating somebody - you know, you're sounding like Faulkner - you're doing pretty good, but your life in Hoboken isn't Faulkneresque.

fiction is not only the historian of life but its apologist.

I do lots of reading and speaking at many universities about literature and also about politics, which is as much a part of my life as the literature.

Everything in life is arbitrary yet must be over-determined in literature. Jean McGarry knows how to tell a persuasive tale illuminating these truths.

I thought Erica Jongs Fear of Flying was one of the biggest pieces of crap that Ive ever read in my life.

Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art.

I never read a novel, they have so little real life and thought in them.

He valued life and literature equally for the light they threw upon each other; to his mind one implied the other; he was unable to conceive of them apart.