Quotes About Literature

I've only read two books in my life: Baseball Sparkplug and Love Story.

Criticism is the endeavour to find, to know, to love, to recommend, not only the best, but all the good, that has been known and thought and written in the world.

I loved and still love watching words flower into sentences and sentences blossom into stories.

I just love historical fiction.

Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul - what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?

I think writing is such a great talent, and if I was better I would love to be a writer.

Mark Twain is a voice of truth and a voice of equality and a voice of tolerance. Which means he is a voice of love.

I think the written word is my first love. I was just a very imagination - centered child and a big part of that imaginary life came from reading.

People who fall in love with books never really stop falling.

You've got to love libraries. You've got to love books. You've got to love poetry. You've got to love everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it.

You know how I love talking about books, and you know how I adore receiving compliments.

A writer who writes, ''I am alone''... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.

Literature professes to be important while at the same time considering itself an object of doubt. It confirms itself as it disparages itself. It seeks itself: this is more than it has a right to do, because literature may be one of those things which deserve to be found but not to be sought.

A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful. Even as a kid, my sister, who was the eldest, brought books home for me, and I think I spent more time sniffing and touching them than reading. I just remember the joy of the book, the beauty of the binding. The smelling of the interior. Happy. [Interview with Emma Brockes, The Believer , November/December, 2012]

Books don't go out of fashion with children. They just go out of fashion with adults and publishers.

these have characterized the work of the best American story writers of the last half-century, from John Cheever to Raymond Carver to Lorrie Moore, and the best Canadians, from Alice Munro to Margaret Atwood to Clark Blaise.

Thanks for being the kind of person who likes to pick up a book. That's a genuinely great thing. I met a librarian recently who said she doesn't read because books are her job and when she goes home, she just wants to switch off. I think we can agree that that's creepy as hell.

And, hey. You. Thanks for being the kind of person who likes to pick up a book. That's a genuinely great thing. I met a librarian recently who said she doesn't read because books are her job and when she goes home, she just wants to switch off. I think we can agree that that's as creepy as hell. Thank you for seeking out stories, the kind that take place in your brain.

The Judas grace (composed, they say, by Christopher Whitrid himself) is noted for its length and for the excellence of its Latinity.

A healthy pallor," qualified the other, who was a constant reader of novels.

To write is to read one's own self

Über Liebe, als Beziehung zwischen den Geschlechtern gebe es nichts Neues mehr zu berichten, das habe die Literatur dargestellt in allen Varianten ein für allemal, das sei für die Literatur, sofern sie diesen Namen verdient, kein Thema mehr - solche Verlautbarungen sind zu lesen; sie verkennen, daß das Verhältnis zwischen den Geschlechtern sich ändert, daß andere Liebesgeschichten stattfinden werden.

the most essential statement in Swiss writing seems to be a certain regret that the nineteenth century is moving further and further away.

Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women's creativity (because they are not themselves at the center of creation, cannot bear children) that a woman writer of genius evokes murderous rage, must be brushed aside with a sneer as "irrelevant"? When