Quotes About Literature

In 1986 we were trying to help women get in print, stay in print, and come to the attention of booksellers and libraries. At that time, books by men mystery writers were reviewed seven times as often as books by women.

I feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer.

I'm definitely more influenced by European writers than I am by American writers, there's no doubt about that.

I didn't know writers could be real live people, because I never knew any writers.

Of course, the way writers think about those things is almost certain to be affected by their own cultural background, and it would be hard to deny that, for whatever reasons, a lot of SF writers come from Anglo or European backgrounds.

There are many more want-to-be writers out there than good editors.

I hope to read a Harry Potter novel soon, to see what it's all about. I admit to being annoyed that many good light fantasy writers have had trouble getting published, in England and elsewhere, when it is obvious the readers were waiting for us all along.

When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.

Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form.

I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.

Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It's endless. I'm sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds.

Today, for a Jew who writes in the German language, it is totally impossible to make a living. In no group do I see as much misery, disappointment, desperation and hopelessness as in Jewish writers who write in German.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

Reagan wrote out many of his radio commentaries and newspaper articles as well as many of his own speeches. He wrote poetry, short stories, and letters. Trump, in his own hand, writes 140-character tweets.

I can't stand Anne Tyler books, but I gobble them up. It's like Updike - I can't stand him either, but I read everything he writes.

Stephen King writes a lot of things that are really charming and quirky, and that are more ironic than horror.

I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.

I do believe, and I will always believe, that Shakespeare on film is really something that should be tried more often because it is an opportunity to take the humanity that Shakespeare writes into characters and express it.

The first author I remember being obsessed by, actually realizing 'I like the way he writes and I like the way he tells stories,' was C.S. Lewis and the 'Narnia' books.

I have a boundless passion for Flaubert. It's unthinkable to me that someone might not have read 'Madame Bovary.' He writes with a scalpel. Everything has meaning. My students were not allowed not to like him!

One thing Tolkien does incredibly well - and this is from a lay person's point of view; I am not scholar or anything - is that you don't have to make an effort to envisage the worlds that he writes about.

The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little - or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives.

Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.

My favourite author as a child and teenager, and who I still re-read now, is K. M. Peyton. She writes very truthfully; sometimes I'm not sure if I've actually done things or just experienced them in her books.