Quotes About Literature

Time may restore us in his course Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force: But where will Europe's latter hour Again find Wordsworth's healing power?

When I was 16, the first book I ever actually purchased with my own money, in fact, and had read on my own time was "Hunt for Red October" by Tom Clancy...

I have been aspiring to write some sort of literature for a long time.

The vulgar and common esteem is seldom happy in hitting right; and I am much mistaken if, amongst the writings of my time, the worst are not those which have most gained the popular applause.

Obviously not a Stephen King level writer, but I'd written short stories and short fiction, from the time I was 12.

In the end, time is the best ally of poets. It clarifies their works and makes them accessible to an ever widening circle of readers.

I was born and raised in Ohio. During my childhood, I spent most of my time drawing and reading fairy tales and myths.

To encounter a fine book and have time to read it is a wonderful thing.

I can write three novels in the time it takes to write one novella. I'm probably not going to go with that form again.

I don't have a day job, so I read any time of day.

Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.

To me [Edgar Allan Poe's] prose is unreadable—like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.

If books are not good company, where shall I find it?

I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spencer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I'm not feeling so well myself.

There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer them, or turn them into literature.

High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.

All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the elect have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so slow, so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle — keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate.

Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.

When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them--then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are far apart.

Those who don't read good books have no advantage over those who can't.

Choosing not to read is like closing an open door to paradise

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.