Quotes About Literature

I didn't read much of anything till I was 15, except Alistair MacLean and Michael Moorcock - the sword and sorcery novels - when I was about 13 or 14.

Writing in India will not dramatically change till we learn to value books.

By the time I was 12, I had memorised hundreds of couplets. I could recite for hours poems written by others. I knew I could write a line in metre. But I never dared to do it till I was 33 years old.

Being a writer in Iceland, you get rewarded all the time: People really do read our books, and they have opinions; they love them, or they hate them. At the average Christmas party, people push politics and the Kardashians aside and discuss literature.

I love the '50s and grew up loving works from that time period and from those great playwrights.

I think that one of the things you have to do to become a storyteller is spend a lot of time reading stories.

If you spend all your time reading books that you only pretend to understand, year after year, there isn't much room for anything else.

I tend to mostly take the day off from working on Sundays, but I do spend some time reading. Mostly what I'm picking up is what's in stores. I really do love to read fiction from the last year or two.

It's pathetic, but I don't really remember my first time reading 'The Great Gatsby.' I must have read it in high school. I'm pretty sure I remember it being assigned, and I generally did the reading. But I don't remember having a reaction to the book, even though I loved literature, and other works made a lasting impression on me at that age.

I rewrote the ending to 'Farewell to Arms,' the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

My favorite book is anything by Kurt Vonnegut - he's my literary hero. I got to meet him several times, which was a great thrill for me. I don't really remember what we talked about.

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.

I was a kid who loved to read. I read everything I could get my hands on. I didn't have one favorite book. I had lots of favorite books: 'The Borrowers' by Mary Norton, 'Paddington' by Michael Bond, 'A Little Princess' by Frances Hodgson Burnett, 'Stuart Little' by EB White, 'A Cricket in Times Square,' all the Beverly Cleary books.

Editors have grown timid... a brave advance is almost inevitably followed by quick back-tracking, generally by dilution and debasement of the original intention.

The publishing world is very timid. Readers are much braver.

My comic timing is completely based on Pu La's literature, his style of writing and the wittiness between the lines.

In 2011, I contributed an essay to Tin House, 'The Dark Side of Dinner Dishes, Laundry, and Child Care,' talking about women writers I felt had fallen off the map.

I love to read books by women I look up to who are smart, funny, and interesting, like Tina Fey's 'Bossypants' and Mindy Kaling's 'Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?'

I've got beautiful reviews for all my books, and I'm very well thought of in the tiny circles that know me, but I'm really starving.

These are just the tip of the iceberg, because I read and read and read. I read everything.

I just am so tired of really badly written women. It's so boring.

I first read the 'Raj Quartet' in the early 1970s, when Paul Scott's decision to set his novels in the dying days of the British Raj in India seemed an eccentric choice, almost as though he did not want readers. The British were tired of their imperial past.

It's true, too, that I'm tired of using books as political bullets and grenades. Books are too precious and wonderful to be used for long in such a fashion.

I always turn to Frank O'Hara and David Berman's 'Actual Air,' which came out in 1999. He's a poet I haven't tired of.