Quotes About Literature

I would recommend to anyone Professor Alan Bullock's definitive Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Daniel Goldhagen's brilliant Hitler's Willing Executioners as well as the above mentioned Those Were the Days.

Greeks were the first people to make coherent narratives, a literature even, of their gods, monsters, and heroes.

Nothing is better than reading and gaining more and more knowledge.

Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales.

I sometimes threw books without indexes to the floor.

History is scholarship. It is also art, and it is literature.

There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.

I'm a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don't read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read

If I show up at your house ten years from now and find nothing in your living room but The Readers Digest, nothing on your bedroom night table but the newest Dan Brown novel, and nothing in your bathroom but Jokes for the John, I'll chase you down to the end of your driveway and back, screaming 'Where are your books? You graduated college ten years ago, so how come there are no damn books in your house? Why are you living on the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese?

The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.

Nora Roberts is cool.

It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written.

He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.

Without story books is like a person with no soul.

Reading is the creative center of a writer's life. -

Explanations are such cheap poetry.

Read sometimes for the story, Bobby. Don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words - the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers that won't do that. But when you find a book that has both good story and good words, treasure that book.

Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.

Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.

Films are ephemeral, while books—the good ones—are eternal, or close to it.

How does it happen that a writer who's not even very good - and I can say that, I've read four or five of his books - gets to be in charge of the world's destiny? Or of the entire universe's? If he's not very good, why didn't you stop at one? Mrs. Tassenbaum smiled. Touché. He is readable, I'll give him that - tells a good story...

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the tools to write.

There's an old rule of theater that goes, 'If there's a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.' The reverse is also true.

That's the curse of the reading class. We can be seduced by a good story even at the most inopportune moments.