Quotes About Literature

If you detect a needlessly complex style when you read, look for characters and actions so that you can unravel for yourself the complexity the writer needlessly inflicted on you.

An important feature of good characterization in a novel is that the characters are dimensionalized and are not all of one piece. Human beings, as Singer noted, have contradictions.

All books have to be researched, but readable books have their research buried.

IF ANYTHING DISTINGUISHES MY GENERATION of American writers, it's that everyone in my generation became a writer, simply through the act of going online. More words have been written, more words have been read, by my generation than by any other generation in human history.

Hank Nearly was an avid reader. He arrived early in his brown corduroy coat, with a book taken from the library, copied all the pages on the Xerox machine, and sat at his desk reading what looked passebly like the honest pages of business. He's make it through a three-hundred-page novel every two or three days.

The novel is the affliction for which only the novel is the cure.

Hating The Great Gatsby (the novel) is like spitting into the Grand Canyon. It will not be going away anytime soon, but you will be.

And we can read - there is always the prospect of escape, through books. Books are not a means of 'escape', Meta! Books are a means of knowledge, and of learning how to cope with the future.

the hopeful young author had no doubt that books might change the world.

Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children's books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she'd been a little girl. There hadn't been such books in the Spivak household on County Line Road, nor would there have been any time for such interludes.

For The Accursed is intended as a work of inquiring moral complexity, and not a "sensationalist" rehashing of an old, dread scandal far better left to molder in the grave!

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul." —

Of course, a literary work is a kind of nest: an elaborately and painstakingly woven nest of words incorporating chunks and fragments of the writer's life in an imagined structure, as a bird's nest incorporates all manner of items from the world outside our windows, ingeniously woven together in an original design.

How ironic, it seemed to me, yet, perhaps, how symbolic, that in our age of rapid mass production and the easy proliferation of consumer products, the richness and diversity of the American literary imagination should be so misrepresented in most anthologies and textbooks! Of

and much more interesting.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily,often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul-- Joyce Carole Oates

Any well-written memoir is worth perusing with an eye to its structure.

Gore Vidal in his memoir Palimpsest.

Dishonest writing is very often mediocre writing.

One of your first tasks, then, is to ask yourself: why do I care about this? The answer will make you feel entitled to tell your own story—to accept that it is not only worthy of being written down but fit material for literature—something you want to revise and craft until it is beautiful.

If books could kill, I would have written more of them before I died.

Unlike Maxine Kumin, I never learned to pay the syntax.

Censors don't want children exposed to ideas different from their own. If every individual with an agenda had his/her way, the shelves in the school library would be close to empty.