Quotes About Literature

If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum.

Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists…. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension.

Books give not wisdome where none was before, But where some is, there reading makes it more.

think I none so simple would say that Aesop lied in the tales of his beasts: for who thinks that Aesop writ it for actually true were well worthy to have his name chronicled among the beasts he writeth of.

A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.

Take the sum of human achievement in action, in science, in art, in literature—subtract the work of the men above forty, and while we should miss great treasures, even priceless treasures, we would practically be where we are today…. The effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty.

Lots of women read fiction. Most men don't. Women read fiction written by women and by men. Most men don't. If a man opens a novel,. he likes to have a masculine name on the cover; it's reassuring somehow. You never know what might happen to that external genitalia if you immerse yourself in imaginary doings concocted by someone with the goods on the inside.

I am fascinated that no one I have read seems to have noticed that the literature on Picasso continually turns grown-up women into girls.

We drank coffee. We talked. She loved Charles Dickens, whom she read in Norwegian. Years after she was dead, I wrote a dissertation on Dickens, and though my study of the great man would no doubt have alarmed her, I had a funny feeling that by taking on the English novelist I was returning to my Norwegian roots.

The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history.

and although the young writer never met his literary mentor, the spiritual connection between the two writers would never be dissolved.

I love stories, I love myths, I love fairytales, I love Kafka.

Liberty is the only idea which circulates with the human blood, in all ages, in all countries, and in all literature - liberty that is, and what cannot be separated from liberty, a love of country.

I don't think you can write - at least not well - if you don't love stories, love the written word.

Day, after day, after glorious day, I was falling in love with books.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

Literary history is the great morgue where all seek the dead ones whom they love, or to whom they are related.

I love an author the more for having been himself a lover of books.

It is true, that it is not at all necessary to love many books, in order to love them much.

Some people consider the way Shakespeare was writing about Ophelia as erotomania-that she was delusional in thinking that Hamlet was in love with her. But I don't think so.

I love reading. I'm fortunate enough to have signed books by Faulkner, Steinbeck, Thomas Pynchon.

Books make great gifts because they're something you love that you can share.

Comics? Honestly, that's more a matter of nostalgia for me. I think most of that energy has gone to my love of literature, and my love of film...

I love picture books. I think some of the best people in children's books are the ones who create their own picture books. I wish I could say I'm one of them, but I'm not.