Quotes About Literature

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth

The Germans have an inhuman way of cutting up their verbs. Now a verb has a hard time enough of it in this world when it's all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's just what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German. from Disappearance of Literature

Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

Once you've put one of his [Henry James] books down, you simply can't pick it up again.

Don't explain your author, read him right and he explains himself.

NOTICE Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR Per G.G.,Chief of Ordnance

There have been daring people in the world who claimed that Fenimore Cooper could write English, but they are all dead now.

Which is him? The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.

There ain't anything that is so interesting to look at as a place that a book has talked about. -- Huck Finn

I don't know anything that mars a good literature so completely as too much truth. Facts contain a great deal of poetry, but you can't use too many of them without damaging your literature.

The best cure for Christianity is reading the Bible. –Mark Twain

Un clásico es un libro que todos alaban y nadie lee

Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.

On a book by Henry James: Once you put it down, you simply can't pick it up.

I like a thin book because it will steady a table, a leather volume because it will strop a razor and a heavy book because it can be thrown at a cat.

Written things are not for speech; their form is literary; they are stiff, inflexible, and will not lend themselves to happy and effective delivery with the tongue--where their purpose is to merely entertain, not instruct; they have to be limbered up, broken up, colloquialized and turned into common forms of premeditated talk--otherwise they will bore the house and not entertain it.

The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades.

These are sad days in literature. Homer is dead. Shakespeare is dead. And I myself am not feeling at all well.

The Germans have another kind of parenthesis, which they make by splitting a verb in two and putting half of it at the beginning of an exciting chapter and the other half at the end of it. Can any one conceive of anything more confusing than that? These things are called separable verbs. The German grammar is blistered all over with separable verbs; and the wider the two portions of one of them are spread apart, the better the author of the crime is pleased with his performance.

The difference between the ALMOST right word and the RIGHT word is really quite a large matter. It's the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.

A man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over a man who can't them

My complaint simply concerns the decay of the _art_ of lying.

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint. Mark Twain