Quotes About Literature

'Invisible Man' holds such an honored place in African-American literature that Ralph Ellison didn't have to write anything else to break bread with the remembered dead. But he did try to go on, because if a writer has done one great thing, then the pressures to do another are intense.

The funny thing with Ophelia is that I remembered her being this really cool, awesome female character when I read 'Hamlet' in high school, and when I went back and read it, no, she's not.

I'm reading Sebastian Faulks's 'Birdsong' at the moment. I read it when I was younger but decided to re-read it, as I remembered really liking it at the time.

Long before we created libraries, or even books, poetry was the way we humans remembered who we were, a primary means of documenting and contemplating our lives.

George V. Higgins's 'The Friends of Eddie Coyle' (1970) added an extra literary layer to the con novel; James Crumley's 'The Last Good Kiss' (1978) influenced countless writers and will be remembered forever for its opening line, quoted often in obituaries of the author.

Part of the job of a children's author is to write books that will be remembered, definitely, but if I might go out on a limb, I will say that the other part, the more important part, is to build books that will help children fall in love with reading. That, to me, is the real job.

All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.

I rely on poetry or literature to keep me centered before I go onstage because it reminds me to be present.

The writers who inspire me most are all women: Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie, Margaret Mitchell and Emily and Charlotte Bronte. As for contemporary novels, one of my favourites is 'Everyone Brave is Forgiven' by Chris Cleave. It's the sort of book to read if you've fallen out of love with reading - it reminds you just how brilliant novels can be.

I come from a very small city in a rather remote part of America, where writers simply weren't part of the daily fabric.

After I'd been in college for a couple years I'd read Shakespeare and Frost and Chaucer and the poets of the Harlem Renaissance. I'd come to appreciate how gorgeous the English language could be. But most fantasy novels didn't seem to make the effort.

I was lucky enough to be a child during the renaissance of Australian children's literature, when people like Ivan Southall, Colin Thiele, Lilith Norman and Wrightson were pumping out hugely inspiring stuff.

I realised at the age of 16 that unless I read the gospels, I would never have access to Renaissance art, to the music of Bach or the novels of Dostoevsky. So in the evenings, when the other boys went to play basketball or chase girls - I had no chance in either - I found my comfort in Jesus.

My parents grew up during the Harlem renaissance.

My interest was in renaissance literature, looking at how men were writing for women in the 1590s, a time when many women were being taught to read but not to write.

Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.

Shakespeare is renewed each time you see it or read it. I've seen 'Midsummer Night's Dream' so many times, and each time it's a little different, or a different line leaps out at me. It's like re-reading a good book over and over, always noticing something you hadn't seen the time before - and that's rare.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

What makes art in general, and literature in particular, remarkable, what distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor repetition. In everyday life, you can tell the same joke thrice and, thrice getting a laugh, become the life of the party. In art, though, this sort of conduct is called 'cliche.'

If you take my stuff apart, you'll find my choruses of repetitions are picked up almost verbatim from Kurt Vonnegut, and my distanced fracture quality is all from Amy Hempel, who's probably my favourite writer.

The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book - it makes a very poor doorstop.

This paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace a hardcover book - it makes a very poor doorstop.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

There is no way for me to replicate for you what a sentence reads like for a Chinese reader.