Quotes About Literature

What I worry about most is the loss to young people. If no one speaks out for them, if they don't speak out for themselves, all they'll get for required reading will be the most bland books available. And instead of finding the information they need at the library, instead of finding the novels that illuminate life, they will find only those materials to which nobody could possibly object.

Eleanor Gordon was the most sophisticated in their crowd. She read The New Yorker.

So many adults are exhausting themselves worrying about other people corrupting their children with books, they're turning kids off to reading instead of turning them on.

I think the child I was until 12 was so much more interesting than the teenager I became. As a teenager, you get wrapped up in your friends and sexual stuff, and the imaginative life you had, it just goes. And mine was so rich and fun. Fortunately, I was able to tap back into that later on [through my books] to save my life.

In an interview after Just Roll Tape was released, Stephen (Stills) said: "There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer for them, or turn them into literature. I've had my share of success and failure at all three.

at times expressing his conviction that literature and music were being absorbed by television, which was turning people into voyeurs.

You can sum me up in about ten words: a former student of English literature who—who—who went downhill from there! Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha!

Well, there's so much to read, and I'm so far behind.

Anyone who reads, even one from the remote Southwest at the far end of an attenuated tradition, is to some extent a citizen of the world, and I had been a hungry reader all my life.

you must have brought something. Books? I never saw you without a green bag of books.

The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.

maybe we were the diggers of literature

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.

Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces.

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.

I like Rhine wine, blue grapes, good cheese, endive and lots of books, etc., etc., etc., as much as I like supreme fiction.

The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.

I am reminded again that the greatest phrase ever written is words, words, words.

Look, don't just stare at the pages," I used to tell my students. "Become the characters. Live inside the book.

Dr. [Richard] Bentley's son reading a novel, the Doctor said, "Why read a book which you cannot quote?"

As soon as histories are properly told there is no more need of romances.

So here I sit in the early candle-light of old age—I and my book—casting backward glances over our travel'd road.

Words! book-words! what are you?

The reason that there are so few good books written is that so few people who write know anything.