Quotes About Literature

Everyone has gone postmodern. They can't even read the text in the original—they're so dependent on some pseudo-philosopher to tell them what it says.

Non sminuire mai, in nessuna circostanza, un'opera letteraria cercando di trasformarla in una copia della vita reale.

They come from a long line of defiant heroines, including Elizabeth Bennet, Catherine Earnshaw and Jane Eyre. These women create the main complications of the plot, through their refusal to comply. They are more complicated than the later, more obviously revolutionary, heroines of the twentieth century, because they make no claims to be radical.

It seemed as if, apart from literature, the political had devoured us, eliminating the personal or private.

He was baffled by Hemingway, felt amibvalent about Fitzgerald, loved Twain and though we should have a national writer like him. I loved and admired Twain but thought all writers were national writers and that there was no such thing as a National Writer.

How does the saying go? When two locusts fight, it is always the crow that feasts.' Is that a Luo expression?' I asked. Sayid's face broke into a bashful smile. We have a similar expression in Luo,' he said, 'but actually I must admit that I read this particular expression in a book by Chinua Achebe. The Nigerian writer. I like his books very much. He speaks the truth about Africa's predicament. the Nigerian, the Kenya - it is the same. We share more than divides us.

Go read a book, she would say. Then come back and tell me something you learned.

En la Unión Soviética, igual que en los países del Este y en Corea del Norte, los censores exigían que el arte, la literatura y el cine estuvieran llenos de alegría, que los héroes fueran felices, que la trama hablara de lograr las cuotas de producción y que el final feliz pasara por un glorioso futuro revolucionario.

Yeah, Erik. You're about as sensitive as a toilet seat, Horatio said. Angie giggled. That's not original. I got it from Holden Caulfield. Who's he? Angie asked. A character in a book. [i]The Catcher In The Rye[/i]. (pg. 69)

Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, trowing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up.

I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.

How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.

A novel! Why do you say this won't liberate anyone? Where does any man go to be free, whether he is poor or rich or even in prison? To Dostoyevsky! To Gogol!

But are there books, books there are! Rattling words on the page calling my eyes to dance with them.

believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book

I see books as windows out of a little life into the great world. Writing fiction is a dance. It's controlled lunacy. Hearing voices in your head — they give people drugs for that. Humans have always needed story. Fiction isn't entertainment, it's a cultural nutrient. We need it, and we will always need it. (from her talk at the Free Library of Philadelphia on 11/10/12)

A book deal, Christ on a bike, quote unquote.

He reads next to nothing. It might interfere with his knowledge of the universe.

She loved the smell of books, the feel of books, the look of them on the shelf.

stuff in." I patted my new pen in my pocket.

Barbara died in 2013, but her legacy lives on in the laughter her books give to readers all over the world.

Literature is the history of the soul.

Certainly, forties science fiction can be seen as a reaction to or against the vision of a single man, John W. Campbell; in the fifties, H L Gold, Fred Phol, Anthony Boucher and a few others began to solicit stories and propound a science fiction of satire and doom, and in the sixties, Michael Moorcock and Harlan Ellison, by pressuring for and proclaiming a literature of catastrophe, got a great deal of it.

More than two decades later we know that American Science Fiction was not murdered. It had a whopper of a heart attack; it lay in the intensive care ward for quite a while. (and had like most indigents to somehow find its way to the hospital itself), but time and a little fresh air did wonders for the patient, who toddled out of the hospital in 1965 and has not yet returned…Over a thousand titles labeled "science fiction" have been published every year since 1978.