Quotes About Literature

When the story is in your mind, then you see its relevance to something happening in your own life. It gives you perspective on what's happening to you. With the loss of that, we've really lost something because we don't have a comparable literature to take its place.

Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.

above—the Council in Europe, you know—mean him to be.' He turned to

In the works of Shakespeare, the most wonderful genius the world has ever known, there is the enormous number of 15,000 different words, but almost 10,000 of them are obsolete or meaningless today.

Shakespeare gathered the fruitage of all who went before him, he has sown the seeds for all who shall ever come after him. He was the great intellectual ocean whose waves touch the continents of all thought.

Every book ought to be read with the same spirit and in the same manner as it is writ—Fielding's Tom Jones.

Great Authors—Classification—The World's Best Books. The Bible is the world's greatest book. Apart from its character as a work of divine revelation, it is the most perfect literature extant. Leaving out the Bible the three greatest works are those of Homer, Dante and Shakespeare. These are closely followed by the works of Virgil and Milton.

INDISPENSABLE BOOKS Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare and Goethe.

If you are not able to procure a library of the great masterpieces, get at least a few. Read them carefully, intelligently and with a view to enlarging your own literary horizon. Remember a good book cannot be read too often, one of a deteriorating influence should not be read at all. In literature, as in all things else, the good alone should prevail.

constant companions throughout the project: Stanley Weintraub's A Stillness Heard Round the World, A. J. P. Taylor's The First World War, John Keegan's The First World War, and Malcolm Brown's The Western Front.

One of the reasons that most literary artists are contemptuous of Sigmund Freud—whose thought Vladimir Nabokov once characterized as no more than private parts covered up by Greek myths—is that his extreme determinism is felt to be immensely untrue to the rich complexity of life, with its twists and turns and manifold surprises.

Susan Sontag as "just another scribbler who spent her life signing up for protest meetings and lumbering to the podium encumbered by her prose style, which had a handicapped parking sticker valid at Partisan Review.

Reading is experience. A biography of any literary person ought to deal at length with what he read and when, for in some sense, we are what we read.

If the novel is an instrument of discovery, what it sets out to discover are bits of that still unsolvable and greatest of all great mysteries, human nature.

I would argue that coffee has been far more important to literature than alcohol.

Clevinger is a very bright guy, a Harvard man, who knows everything about literature except how to enjoy it.

He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it. Yossarian

Stia totul despre literatura, in afara de modul in care se putea bucura de ea.

They couldn't touch him because he was Tarzan, Mandrake, Flash Gordon. He was Bill Shakespeare. He was Cain, Ulysses, the Flying Dutchman; he was Lot in Sodom, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Sweeney in the nightingales among trees.

His novel, a work he had wrestled with, on and off, for almost three years, he had finally abandoned after one page. The novel was derivative of a poem Gold had written seven years before that was itself derived from a brilliant exegesis by a young Englishman of the works of Samuel Beckett that Gold wished he'd written himself.

When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as Catch-22 I'm tempted to reply, Who has?

He was generally disappointed by the new novels of the early postwar years: "There was a terrible sameness about books being published and I almost stopped reading as well as writing.

the Revolution did not produce a single piece of imaginative literature that has endured. The generation of writers who came of age during the Revolution breathed in a supercharged ideological atmosphere; they pressed themselves and their art into the service of their country, only to discover that a republic could be as demanding a patron as a wealthy prince.

American literary culture proved to be less like an explosion that went off with the Revolution than a tender plant that required over fifty years of cultivation before it blossomed.