Quotes About Literature

No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Hemingway's postwar novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war.

Literature more often tells the story of impulses we don't act on than of ones we do. I could joke about the Cain and Abel story with my brother without expecting him to be worried, though it's always possible he was more anxious than he let on.

I read a lot of comics growing up. My mom used to say, 'Would you please read a book?' She was worried where I was going in my life.

I wager we have a vast amount of literature out there that tends to the stories of men, so I've never really worried too much about attending to stories of women.

It worries me that undergrads and high school students are forced into books they aren't ready for, like Faulkner's, and then they are afraid of putting their toes in the water again.

If you want to be a writer, don't worry so much about writing. Read as much as you can. Read as many different writers as you can. Soak up the styles.

Octavia Butler was more interested in writing a good story than in worrying about where to slot it.

Reading isn't about managing expectations. In certain ways, writing is. You're trying to send signals early in a book about what might be coming later, but I think worrying about the kind of chatter around a book is something I try and stay as far away from when I'm reading.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

No poetry that I'm aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it.

I put the copy of 'A Christmas Carol' that my grandfather had first read to me 60 years ago on my desk, and I began to write. The result, for better or for worse, is the 'Christmas Spirits.' I plan to read it to my grandson.

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.

I can't think of anything worse than calling Shakespeare 'highbrow,' because on the one hand, it's brilliant writing. But his plays were popular. People went to see them.

I still have my high school copy of the collected Poe - missing its covers and pretty worse for the wear.

The reaction to 'Aftermath' has been far worse than to 'A Life's Work,' yet I find I'm perhaps a little less touched by it. In both cases, I've coped artistically by believing the criticisms weren't right. They upset me, but they didn't challenge my understanding of how to write, nor of how morality functions in literature.

The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective.

I think there are worse things for a teen to be enraptured with than 'Twilight.'

The big problem is just this kind of gigantic piece, of kids reading less and liking it less and so getting worse at it. It's kind of this terrible spiral: Since they're not so good at it they do less of it, get worse at it, do less of it. And it's really what I discovered five, six years ago when I started the 'Guys Read' thing.

Without a sense of place the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego.

Even in the most peaceful communities, an appetite for violence shows up in dreams, fantasies, sports, play, literature, movies and television. And, so long as we don't transform into angels, violence and the threat of violence - as in punishment and deterrence - is needed to rein in our worst instincts.

I'm the world's worst at reading reviews and then pretending I've read the book.

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.

Do I mind being called a chick-lit writer? Well, it's not the worst thing that could happen.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.