Quotes About Literature

It is now my favorite book of all time, but then again, I always think that until I read another book. My

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.

The teacher has assigned us a few chapters at a time, but I do not like to read books like

Bill said I was 'developing' at a rapid pace and gave me a different kind of book as a 'reward'. It's On the Road by Jack Kerouac. I'm now up to about ten cigarettes a day.

I have spent the whole vacation reading Hamlet. Bill was right. It was much easier to think of the kid in the play like the other characters I've read about so far. It has also helped me while I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with me. It didn't give me any answers necessarily, but it was helpful to know that someone else has been through it.

I am no fan of books.

Rush are) like the JD Salinger of Canadian Prog Rock

As far as I can tell, a young-adult novel is a regular novel that people actually read.

Used books are the sluts of the literary world. Passed around from person to person, spreading their pages for anyone, getting cheaper and cheaper until eventually they end up in prison.

What was it Pound had said in the Cantos? "I am not a demigod—I can't make it cohere.

Fill in the blanks, you'd have a novel; keep it short and it's a play by Beckett.

I am someone who has spent his adult life on the periphery of literature in the way that a small animal will remain just beyond the glow of the campfire, observing the strange doings of the human creatures settling in for the night.

I am often asked, "What is the secret to being a successful author?" My reply, always, is: "Marry an English major.

If a thing can be said in ten words, I may be relied upon to take a hundred to say it. I ought to apologize for that. I ought to prune, pare and extirpate excess growth, but I will not. I like words—strike that, I love words—and while I am fond of the condensed and economical use of them in poetry, in song lyrics, in Twitter, in good journalism and smart advertising, I love the luxuriant profusion and mad scatter of them too.

Literature is the only access to truth we have on this planet.

lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books, and go to plays, perhaps be in plays…

It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame, and self-loathing - they are not all bad. Those devils have also been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter, and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

It is complete loose stool water. It is arse-gravy of the worst kind. - About The Da Vinci Code

We have also an edition of The Trial, by the notorious Jew, Kafka. Berlin would appreciate it, I am thinking, if this too was added to the bonfire. Also the works of that decadent lesbian Bolshevik, Jane Austen.

I like to think of this little [newspaper] column as a brassière, or do I mean brasserie? Brazier, possibly. All three! A column that lifts, separates, supports, serves excellent cappuccino and crackles merrily with sweet-smelling old chestnuts.

To use a distinction made by E. M. Forster when talking about people in novels, the world now went from flat characters to rounded characters—to the development of personalities whose actions could surprise. The fun began.

If that kind of poetry doesn't make your bosom heave then I fear we shall never be friends.

he had read and absorbed more than he could understand, so he lived by pastiche and pretence.

We have 18 or 19 plays by Euripides, for example, yet he is known to have written almost 100. Only 7 of Aeschylus's 80 remain, while just 7 plays of Sophocles have come down to us out of 120 known titles. Almost every character you come across when reading the Greek myths had a play about them written by one, other, or all three of the great Athenian masters. The loss of so many of their works might be regarded as the greatest Greek tragedy of them all.