Quotes About Literature

It's both an alternative history of the novel and a history of the alternative novel.

Long after the children had dispersed, they avidly exchanged books and reading recommendations as if no book was truly read until all had read it.

It takes cognitive toil and literary dexterity to pare an argument to its essentials, narrate it in an orderly sequence, and illustrate it with analogies that are both familiar and accurate.

To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life's greatest pleasures. And

four out of 69,406 authors of peer-reviewed articles in the scientific literature rejected the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, and that "the peer-reviewed literature contains no convincing evidence against [the hypothesis].

Reading is a technology for perspective-taking.

John Dryden wrote that a work of fiction is "a just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind.

creative wordsmiths, who need to know the canons of pedestrian prose

Careful writers pick up the nuances of words by focusing on their makeup and their contexts over the course of tens of thousands of hours of reading.

The main danger in using these forms is that a more-grammatical-than-thou reader may falsely accuse you of making an error. If they do, tell them that Jane Austen and I think it's fine.

The cultural anthropologists or literary scholars who avow that the truths of science are merely the narratives of one culture will still have their child's infection treated with antibiotics prescribed by a physician rather than a healing song performed by a shaman.

Much of the joy of writing comes from shopping from the hundreds of thousands of words that English makes available.

In fact, these reference works, with their careful attention to history, literature, and actual usage, are the most adamant debunkers of grammatical nonsense. (This is less true of style sheets drawn up by newspapers and professional societies, and of manuals written by amateurs such as critics and journalists, which tend to mindlessly reproduce the folklore of previous guides.)

Style, not least, adds beauty to the world. To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life's greatest pleasures.

After noting Snow's "utter lack of intellectual distinction and . . . embarrassing vulgarity of style," Leavis scoffed at a value system in which "'standard of living' is the ultimate criterion, its raising an ultimate aim.

For the expressions to proliferate so easily, speakers and hearers must be dissecting the implied metaphor to lay bare the connexions between the things named by the metaphor and the abstract concepts they are really talking about. (In literary theory these are sometimes called the 'vehicle' and the 'tenor' of the metaphor; cognitive scientists call them the 'source' and the 'target'.)

At the time of the report, the entire Arab world exported fewer manufactured goods than the Philippines, had poorer Internet connectivity than sub-Saharan Africa, registered 2 percent as many patents per year as South Korea, and translated about a fifth as many books into Arabic as Greece translates into Greek.

I slept little, read a lot, and fell in love frequently.

It's not a terribly original thing to say, but I love Raymond Carver. For one thing, he's fun to read out loud.

If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?

Cooking is great, love is grand, but soufflés fall and lovers come and go. But you can always depend on a book!

I don't want to sound pretentious, but I love art, I like to go to museums, and I like to read books.

I feel as if when you love a book it becomes a part of you whether you have it on your shelves or not.

I do love translating; it is the pure pleasure of writing without the misery of inventing.