Quotes About Literature

When you read the book, you paint the picture but when you adapt a book then the audience will, by and large, say the book was better and every filmmaker knows this.

Music enriches people's lives in the same way paintings and literature do. Everybody deserves that.

I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.

Many, many of my paintings have come from the first chapter of Moby Dick.

I had a major bug for cities and for paintings and literature and all the things I thought went on in cities.

I think I grew up in an 'acultural' household - no books, no paintings, never went to an art gallery. I say that, but of course we had the TV.

I read Ann Cleeves's books and think the way she paints Shetland is very interesting.

There are distinctions between Indian and Pakistani writers.

I've always loved the poetry in 'Pale Fire.' I think it's wonderful.

I don't like to have to pan for gold when I read.

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.

I can still put down some pretty nasty stuff on paper, which is what I enjoy doing.

When I started writing, I just hoped for a nice little paperback series.

My high-school papers, my college-application essays, read like Norman Mailer packed in a crunchy-peanut-butter sandwich.

'Parable of the Sower' is capital-I Important. Put it on the literary fiction shelf. Put it on the Holy Crap fiction shelf. Put it on every shelf. This is one of the all-time great American novels.

To be able to play Jack Kerouac or Sal Paradise, it's mad to me.

I really like 'This Side of Paradise' by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I think it's a cool description of a character.

We have been teaching 'Paradise Lost' and 'Julius Caesar' to the students but we are not teaching them 'Kalidas' or Indian drama and epics.

I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.

Just as I could tell you about my first Andre Norton novel or my first L'Engle or my first Asimov, I could write a paragraph about how each of these writers influenced me, my writing, and my thoughts, and do to this day.

I'm always looking for complicated characters in fiction about whom I can feel a dozen feelings at once - in the space of a single paragraph, even.

Like many people, I had the powerful experience of being raised on Dr. Seuss, then becoming a parent and revisiting him with my own children. That multigenerational experience around his work is very meaningful.

There's no shortage of orphans in 19th-century literature, but it's hard to find a single happy, communicative, functional parental relationship in the whole of 'Great Expectations,' even among the minor characters.

I'd park myself in the bookstore and read with one eye on everyone coming in. I remember reading a Robert Bly book of poetry.