Quotes About Literature

Oh –! At least own that you would provoke a saint!' 'I never tried to. You are no saint!

Well, if you think it nothing to send her laudatory verses masquerading as acrostics, and to ransack all the libraries for the works of her favourite poets, you must be as green as she is!' he said caustically. She could not help laughing. 'Does he do so? I thought they were his favourites too: he is certainly very well read in them.' 'Pea-goose! So would you be, if you made it your business to study them!

You were not acquainted with my father, Mr Morville. I have often been sorry that you were not, for you would have been excessively pleased with one another. My father was a great reader, though not, of course, during the hunting-season.

Vauxhall. 'I did not scruple to accept, my

Ay, and what do you think he was doing when I walked in? Reading poetry to her! What a booberkin! I can tell you this, my boy: in my day we'd more rumgumption than to bore a pretty woman into a lethargy!

It's true I only know what I've read in books, but I've read a great many books.

But books, when you want to buy them, are costly and, when you need to sell them, valueless.

The Merchant said it was wonderful - a great contribution to the body of English literature. Personally, I would have preferred a pirate story.

Reading was my first solitary vice (and led to all others). I read while I ate, I read in the loo, I read in the bath. When I was supposed to be sleeping, I was reading.

Paperback, 160 Seiten, ISBN 978-3-937392-80-6

Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.

Remarks are not literature.

She always says that americans can understand spaniards. That they are the only two western nations that can realize abstraction. That in americans it expresses itself b disembodiedness, in literature and machinery, in Spain by ritual so abstract that it does not connect itself with anything but ritual.

Paris was where the twentieth century was.

Oh grammar is so fine.

English?' I asked.

I was nearly 40 when I published my first book. I was a slow starter - or rather, I was slow to gather my work together, though I had published translations, mainly of the Italian poet Montale, by then.

I worked in a bookstore in Oslo, importing the English-language books.

Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience.

When I left home after graduating high school, I left as a migrant agricultural worker with a Modern Library edition of Plato in my duffel bag. It sounds kind of crazy, but I loved it. I loved the stuff. Before I knew there was a subject called philosophy, I loved it.

I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

I think the reason working-class people don't write books is because they are encouraged to believe that only certain people are permitted to write books.

I come from a working-class background where I was much more likely to read socialist books and leaflets than Bronte or Dickens - neither of whom I've yet read.