Quotes About Literature

I've never written a children's book, but when people meet me for the first time and I say I write books, they invariably reply, 'Children's books?' Maybe it's something about my face.

I'd read Up in the Old Hotel, and I wanted to do something with Mitchell's stuff for a long time.

I have finished To Kill a Mockingbird. It is now my favorite book of all time, but then again, I always think that until I read another book.

One of the great joys of my job is that you spend a huge amount of time investigating different areas of literature.

When you stack up all the years we are allowed against all there is to read, time is very short indeed.

Critics have been amusing themselves for a long time by auscultating fiction for signs of heart failure.

We live in a dark time. Books are as dark as what is available to teenagers through the media every day.

I often say I've spent more time with photography than I have with literature just in terms of hours.

I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science.

Dedication: For all the girls who walk and read at the same time.

There are more books in the world than hours in which to read them. We are thus deeply influenced by books we haven't read, that we haven't had the time to read.

Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.

I also like to do physical things. I like swimming a lot. I like traveling. Not touring traveling but just plain traveling. I also read a lot. Reading takes up most of my time.

When I'm about to start writing, I pull up some of my all-time-favorite re-reads to feel inspired and fall headfirst into the world of beautiful words.

I am all the time thinking about poetry and fiction and you.

At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be published. You had to be great. Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that's good.

I mainly buy books in my free time.

Every time one of my books sells a million copies in paperback, Pan Macmillan gives me a gold statuette of Pan. I have about 20 of them.

Honestly, I haven't the time to read contemporary writers. I know this is awful, but in the main it is true.

I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.

First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.

Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.

I thought a dignified thing to do would be to live in the country by the time I'm 50 and write books