Quotes About Literature

I recommend for any basic course on the Beat Generation to familiarize yourself with 'The Idiot,' Prince Myshkin. He was Dostoyevsky's idea of the most beautiful human being he could imagine, the creation of a saint in literature.

Sometimes my readers ask me what else they should read, and I recommend Sebald.

I get asked a lot what books I recommend for a nursery, home library, etc., and I always tell parents to start with what they loved as children, what they want to share, and broaden out from there.

One book that I just think is absolutely beautiful is 'The Kite Runner.' I'd recommend that one to any and everyone.

When people ask for book recommendations, I say this: Do some math. If you read one book every week for the rest of your life, and if you're lucky enough to live for 50 more years, you're only going to get to 2,600 books.

Asking anyone what she or he is reading is a necessary part of conversation, exchanging news. So I take recommendations from friends - and I always pass along a book I've loved.

If I like a book, I tend to read the author's entire collection. But I choose mainly through personal recommendations, general word of mouth and book reviews.

Some of my best book recommendations have come from booksellers.

My main motive for going into children's literature was to recreate the helpless giggling that infected me in my childhood. In some ways, I imagine I'm returning the favour.

American writers reduce the length of time devoted to exposition and character development.

What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.

To my ear, the term 'comic novelist' is as redundant and off-putting as the term 'literary novelist'.

White people use their literature to maintain culture. That's why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels.

But it's not just a game of finding literary references.

I decided if I couldn't be a writer, my life would be miserable. I had this imaginary room of references to all the books I had read, a kind of bubble, in which I lived.

I think that children's books should be censored not for references to sex but for references to diseases. I mean, who didn't think after reading 'Madeline' that they were going to get appendicitis?

I was too prissy, too refined, too abstemious, too French to be a good American writer.

My go-to author for knowing it all is Evelyn Waugh. 'A Handful of Dust' is as perfect as a book can get.

After school, I'd hang out at the Borders bookstore until it closed.

In a book, you can describe a scene and have any song you want playing on the radio and have any painting you want hanging on the wall. That was really freeing to me when I was writing 'Ready Player One.' I could throw in everything that I love.

'Fahrenheit 451' postulates a lot of things I didn't want to have happen.

I think one of the saddest things that's happening to literature is that it's getting over-simplified by this diet of simple political ideas.

I have a shelf of comfort books, which I read when the world closes in on me or something untoward happens.

Dark books do appeal to kids because they have nice, sheltered lives - and they also appeal to children who are going through pretty hard times themselves.