Quotes About Literature

I blamed the whole mess on Charles Dickens.

Some argue the days of furthering or bettering oneself through a liberl arts education are gone, but that's true only if furthering and bettering means making more money...For many life reveals itself more intimately in literature than in ledgers.

No book is really worth reading at the age of 10 which is not equally worth reading at the age of 50.

Some children like how-to-do-it or all-about-everything type books, but I suspect parents like them best because they look so educational. These really should be in a separate category because they don't usually classify and literature but are more nearly manuals of information. Paul Hazard suggests that instead of pouring out so much knowledge on a child's soul that it is crushed, we should plant a seed of an idea that will develop from the inside.

Literature is the royal road that enables us to enter the realm of the imagination.

parents who read widely together with their children are going to be those who most influence their children

books are nothing but repositories for those lies the author wants his reader to believe.

GORDON KORMAN wrote his first book at age fourteen

a writer must always tell the truth (unless he's a journalist)

What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?

The worst thing to happen to Lincoln - aside from the unfortunate incident at Ford's theatre - was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.

Sexual revelation in literature, must be tactful and must serve plot

Con todo, ni siquiera yo puedo crear un personaje imaginado que resulte tan unidimensional como el lector corriente

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps twenty players, and Tennessee Williams has about five, and Samuel Beckett one--and maybe a clone of that one. I have ten or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made

This is not at all bad, except as prose.

Weil der Pöbel noch sein Gefühlt hat, das bei Vornehmern durch tausend unnatürliche Vorstellungen verderbt und geschwächt wird.

Feed your head means read a book.

One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books.

All good novelists have bad memories.

There's nothing so heavy as books, sir--unless it's bricks.

The influence of early books is profound. So much of the future lies on the shelves. Early reading has more influence than any religious teaching.

I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate,...

There are times, aren't there, when Shakespeare is a little dull.