Quotes About Literature

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

My theory on genre is that while there are people out there who believe that genre tells people what to read, actually I believe that genre exists as a marketing tool to tell you what to avoid.

A writer is a tool of the language rather than the other way around.

After the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, science fiction became a tool for popularizing scientific knowledge, and its main intended readers were children.

I was the kind of reader in smudged pink harlequin glasses sitting on the cool, dusty floor of the Arrandale public library, standing at the edge of the playground, having broken a tooth in dodge ball, and lying under my covers with a flashlight.

I know a lot of people who read 'Sweet Tooth' are the kind of people who don't read a lot of other comics. Whatever it was, I'm just glad it happened.

I've always loved words. I ate up all the books I could get my hands on, and when I couldn't get books, I read candy wrappers and labels on cereal and toothpaste boxes.

Almost all novels are improved by cutting from the top. On their first pages, authors parade those favourite effects which disgust the impartial reader.

In PhD, my topic was Stage Techniques in Sanskrit Drama - theory and practice. I wanted to combine my drama training with Sanskrit drama, which has a very rich history in literature.

There are no taboos. Every topic is open, however shocking. It is the way that the topics are handled that's important, and that applies whether it is a 15-year-old who is reading your book or someone who is 55.

I sat with myself one day and asked, 'Who is in those prestigious literary circles? Do they represent me? Do they appreciate the topics I write about and the style in which I write? Do those gatekeepers let a demographic like mine through the door?' And the answer was no.

I liked early Amis a lot, but I stopped reading him some time ago. I admire Hitchens on literary topics - I think he is very astute. McEwan, I read a bit. But I suppose it's more the ideological phenomenon that they represent together that interests me.

I loved reading. I was one of those kids who was supposed to go to bed but had a torch under the duvet. That love of reading stayed with me.

A writer has a difficult fate, but a Jewish writer has an especially difficult fate. His soul is torn; he lives on two streets with three languages. It is a misfortune to live on this sort of 'border,' and that is what I have experienced.

To a lot of us, literature's eternal significance had seemed beyond arguing - like, say, the illegality of government-sponsored torture.

Reading a book you are not enjoying is a torture not to be undertaken without a reward. I leave plays at the interval, too!

Russia itself is an extremely complex country, and sometimes I feel like all of that comes back to haunt me. I can see why so many Russian writers were so tortured.

Foreign writers - especially Germans - often feel that Shakespeare is really one of them, that he was somehow accidentally born in the wrong country. In much the same way, leftists sense in their bones that he was a radical, rightists that he was a Tory.

The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

The only good Philip K. Dick film is 'Total Recall.' It's faithful to the book. Arnie gets it.

I didn't go to university; I hardly went to school, but I grew up among people well versed in Henry James and Proust, and just felt this endless, total inadequacy.

I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.

When I was a teenager I was a total romantic escapist. My world was books.

In the 1930s, all the novelists had seemed to be people who came blazing up into stardom from out of total obscurity. That seemed to be the nature of the beast. The biographical notes on the dustjackets of the novels were terrific.