Quotes About Literature

If any imagine from the literary tone of the preceding remarks that we are indifferent to the radical movement for the benefit of the masses which is the crowning glory of the nineteenth century, they will soon discover their egregious mistake.

If I take a less defensive tone, I'd admit that I couldn't write today a very jazzy, contemporary look at America as I did in 1979 in States of Desire.

Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.'

Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can't tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it.

The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.

There's something nice and intimate about having a book. You know that someone's actually gone on this journey. You know that someone has actually researched and reported all these things. You can see and hear their tone in what they chosen to include and what they haven't.

It's funny, because people always say when they meet me, having read me - or they read me, having met me - that they are struck by how the tone is pretty similar, in real life and in the books.

My lip curls in a snide reflex whenever I hear that a new novel is written from the point of view of a child or a monster, a lunatic or an animal. I immediately expect a nasty coyness of tone, cheesy artifice, the world through cardboard 3-D lenses.

I've always loved 'Alice,' and I've always loved Lewis Carroll. I love his kind of tone and his intelligence.

I read 'The Young Landlords' and felt almost a chemical change. What I realized while reading that book was that I could write in my voice, use my tongue, my language, my style, and write a story.

I have a lot of feminist idols. My favorite thing about growing up in Arkansas - well, not favorite but something I've always felt grateful for - was that I really had to dig for what I could. There was no Internet. There wasn't tons of feminist literature floating around.

I have always loved really dense, complicated stories with lots of layers, tons of obscure literary references, and a plethora of inside jokes.

My dad is a big extrovert - he's a doctor - but he always loved Shakespeare, and he took us to tons of theater.

I've read a lot of bad books. I used to review books for a living, and when you're a reviewer you read tons of terrible books.

I have 800 books of just Samuel Beckett's work, tons of his correspondence, personal letters that he wrote. I have copies of plays he used when he directed, so all of his handwritten notes are in the corners of the page.

As far as fiction goes, as far as everything from Dr. Seuss to Oscar Wilde to Bret Easton Ellis. Ray Bradbury. There's just tons of stuff that I love. Neil Gaiman!

I never, ever want to be in a position where people are sitting round a table, saying, 'We've got this book. I don't really get it, but we paid for it, so we've got to sell it.' I'm not Tony Parsons; that's not right for me.

I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.

Shakespeare's name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down.

In India, too many people do not write memoirs, but Natwar Singh and P. C. Alexander did.

We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.

I love books. Probably too much for my own good.

I sort of mind living in a time when most of the literature is terribly personal. I suppose it's because I grew up on a love of history, philosophy, science and religion, but not to think too much about yourself.

Too much of Indian writing in English, it seemed to me, consisted of middle-class people writing about other middle-class people - and a small slice of life being passed off as an authentic portrait of the country.