Quotes About Literature

All of the great writers whom I admire have died. I guess the most recent one would be Marquez.

One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.

In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.

In many joyfully-admired recent novels, love appears as little more than sex-manual instruction.

For a wide-ranging look at literary matters, the 'Book Review Podcast' from the 'New York Times' is still one of the best. Presented by Pamela Paul, each episode has an interview with an author - recent guests have included Neil Gaiman and Sana Krasikov - plus a roundup of the uppers, downers and hanging-arounders on the U.S. bestsellers chart.

I've recently rediscovered Anthony Trollope. I used to read him back in college, and a friend turned me on to a whole new series of his work, 'The Palliser Series.' It's a series of seven or eight books.

There's no such thing as the contemporary novel. Before I seem the complete reactionary, let me add that I've happily joined in many discussions about 'the contemporary novel' where what that usually, unproblematically means is novels that have appeared recently or may appear soon.

I heard David Sedaris read live recently which was a complete delight. Few writers make me laugh out loud on the bus. He does.

Recently I read that half the world or more has read 'The Lord of The Rings,' but then I found out that something like 75 per cent of the world knows the 'Tintin' books.

I believe if you write a great book, the chances are it'll get a great reception.

Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

As a child, I learned hundreds of poems by heart, which I can recite to this day.

Shakespeare is absolutely big in Africa. I guess he's big everywhere. Growing up, Shakespeare was the thing. You'd learn monologues and you'd recite them. And just like hip-hop, it made you feel like you knew how to speak English really well. You had a mastery of the English language to some extent.

If you can read, then you can recite Shakespeare. But that's not acting.

I am such a reclusive person that, literally, when I am done shooting, at some level I sort of disassociate myself, and I get back to reading my books.

I think the more you understand myths, the more you understand the roots of our culture and the more things will resonate. Do you have to know them? No, but certainly it is nice to recognise how deeply these things are embedded in our literature, our art.

By the time Florence Nightingale got her neurotic hands on Cleopatra, she had been mangled beyond recognition by both history and literature.

Irish poetry has lost the ready ear and the comforts of recognition. But we must go on. We must be true to our own minds.

This character's entirely invented, and the woman that I interviewed wouldn't recognize herself, or really anything about herself, in this book, which she hasn't read, because she doesn't read English.

I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.

People generally don't recognize how long it takes to conceive, publish, and write a book.

In the past, I was sometimes put in this women's lit category, and I was never really sure that was the appropriate place for me - although I certainly recognize it can be helpful and correct for other people.

I'm a big reader, so when I was in 'Pride and Prejudice,' or, like, in Poirots and Marples, those are all books that I loved, and so it was really exciting for me to inhabit characters from literature that I knew and recognized.

It makes me happy to meet other poetry fans. Especially when they recommend poets I'm not familiar with.