Quotes About Literature

If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.

A good novel is worth more than the best scientific study.

I won't go so far as to say that novels sell in inverse proportion to their worth, for just occasionally, someone like Dickens or George Eliot comes along to prove the opposite.

I'm under no illusions about the importance of my work. But if it has any worth, it is that it truly reflects the Brazilian people.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn't worth reading.

People who grew up on my books are now able to get the point across to others that they're worth reading.

I don't read anything anymore. I don't have the eyesight. I read my own copy, that's all. I think I've read everything that's worth reading.

It's doubtful that any fiction worth reading has been produced on a computer running Windows Vista.

The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.

The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some sense of what makes literature worth reading.

In my high-minded and naive way, I believed the only books worth reading were the classics.

The sacred books of all the world are worthless dross and common stones compared with Shakespeare's glittering gold and gleaming gems.

When I was young my Father used to tell me that the two most worthwhile pursuits in life were the pursuit of truth and of beauty and I believe that Alfred Nobel must have felt much the same when he gave these prizes for literature and the sciences.

John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.

I always lamented that I wasn't a writer during the late '60s and the early '70s, with the New Journalism and Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson and all those people.

In terms of sheer pleasure, Tom Stoppard was very big for me because he is so funny and so smart, and it felt delicious reading him.

One should take writers' valuations of their own work with a pinch of salt: they are likely to rank them differently tomorrow.

I was an English major in college, took a ton of creative writing courses, and was a newspaper reporter for 10 years.

I see a ton of theatre whenever I'm not working to stay inspired. I love feeling like I'm a part of the theatre community and following the work of actors and writers I admire. I'm a big reader, too.

I don't know why - I have a ton of books: five full cabinets of them.

As a teenager, I didn't read a ton of teen fiction, and now I feel like I wish that I had.

My mom made me read a ton of books, so I got good at words and understood the English language. So when I started rapping, words were something I knew. I learned how to manipulate them so that I could say whatever I wanted to say.