Quotes About Literature

Dickens became one of the greatest interpreters of urban life because he was a prodigious walker; his visceral encounters with the physical and human cityscape run through all his work. Urban literature is bound up with walking, because walking takes you away from the familiar, down "long perplexing lanes untrod before," as John Gay put it in his 1716 poem "Trivia; or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London.

I can feel infinitely alive curled up on the sofa reading a book.

Science is like literature, a continuing dialog among diverse and conflicting voices, no one ever wholly right or wholly wrong, but a steady conversation forever provisional and personal and living.

INTRODUCTION The very acute and lively Spanish critic who signs himself Clarin, and is known personally as Don Leopoldo Alas, says the present Spanish novel has no yesterday, but only a day-before-yesterday.

Benito Pérez Galdós

Conor Carrington,

Maggie, la criada,

The most noble criticism is that in which the critic is not the antagonist so much as the rival of the author

There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.

No sabéis quiénes son los críticos? Aquellos que no han tenido éxito en la literatura y en el arte.

When I want to read a book, I write one.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

When I want to read a good book I write one.

All the little money that ever came into my hands was ever laid out in books.

Reading was the only amusement I allowed myself

Read much, but not many books!

If you would be remembered, write a book worth the reading or live a life worth the writing about.

Vol. 4: Complete Poems in English, Milton

Bookstores should be broken down into two sections: books that suck and books that don't suck.

All stories are in conversation with other stories. —Neil Gaiman

I would encourage subtlety. Nabokov's bubble gum or Munro's water over Dumbo's magic feather.

Maybe Virginia Woolf thought about going to the lighthouse, but I doubt she ever got there, or the novel might have ended differently.

A-B-D-C-E structure of a story, an acronym for Action-Background-Development-Conflict-Ending.

Realism is the trend.