Quotes About Literature

I don't think I'll ever lose the feeling that I had when I read 'To Kill a Mockingbird' - Harper Lee was going back into her childhood. I grew up in a real small town - Lee's was in the South, mine the Northwest - but small towns have a lot in common. There was such a revelation in knowing that a story could be told like that.

'Fault' became the book everybody and their mother had to read, and 'Paper Towns' is one that's beloved, but it's a bit of a smaller book.

As a 13-year-old fan of horror fiction, I hadn't seen too many cities in the literature I loved. It was always small towns, or backwoods locales, or maybe the suburbs.

I can trace my interest in modern classics to the summer before art college.

I believe the fast track to atheism is reading the Bible. I've read it three times all the way through. It's a big part of our culture, a big part of our history. I don't just read things I agree with.

A novel is like a gland pill - it nips off the cream of my hysterics and gets them running on track in a book where they belong instead of rioting all over my person.

A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug.

It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.

Happily, financial capitalism and free trade have not done away with national languages and literatures, as Marx rather too blithely hoped.

You can't trademark the word 'sci-fi.'

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.

Certainly the beat writers I've known who carried forward the original, you know, I'd say that came together in the 1940s and 50s. So I was inheriting in a way some of that ethos.

A book is quite a beautiful thing, even more so learning. Together, however, all they amount to is called book-learning.

The way that words fit together is always interesting to me. I love words.

There is an Arabic writer who wrote philosophy and poetry and who brought all religions and all the world together.

Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote!

The most crucial thing is to learn the craft: how to string sentences together, how to make your dialogue sound like real people, how to properly pace a story, how to develop interesting characters.

Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party.

Shakespeare never had six lines together without a fault. Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion.

Travel the world, learn other languages, demand liberty, despise violence, read books, and keep a dictionary nearby.

Travel Far, Pay No Fare... a book can take you anywhere.

You can travel through literature, and you can expand your mind through literature. It's so cheap to buy that kind of ticket.

Rereading a favorite novel first read 5, 10, or 20 years ago, is a measure of our travel, how far we've come; it's a way of visiting an earlier self.

The two things that constantly inspired me were books and travel.