Quotes About Literature

All aspiring writers say these things: I will not compromise and write a best seller!—as if they could! There may be a few totally faked-up books that sell, but on the whole I believe every writer writes as well as he can.

When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.

I had read a Tale of Two Cities and found it up to my standards as a romantic novel. She opened the first page and I heard poetry for the first time in my life...her voice slid in and curved down trough and over the words. She was nearly singing.

I wouldn't miss Mrs. Flowers, for she had given me her secret word which called forth a djinn who was to serve me all my life: books.

I found it hard to think of leaving my books. They had been my elevators out of the midden, and to whom could I entrust such close friends?

Your grandmother says you read a lot. Every chance you get. That's good, but not good enough. Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning.

Sua avó diz que você lê muito. Em todas as oportunidades que tem. Isso é bom, mas não o suficiente. Palavras significam mais do que é colocado no papel. É preciso a voz humana para dar a elas as nuances do significado mais profundo.

During these years in Stamps, I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare. He was my first white love.

Although I enjoyed and respected Kipling, Poe, Butler, Thackeray and Henley, I saved my young and loyal passion for Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. Du Bois' "Litany at Atlanta." But it was Shakespeare who said, "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes." It was a state with which I felt myself most familiar.

Me había transmitido su palabra secreta con la que convocar un genio que había de servirme toda la vida: libros

I read more than ever, and wished my soul that I had been born a boy. Horatio Alger was the greatest writer in the world. His heroes were always good, always won, and were always boys. I could have developed the first two virtues, but becoming a boy was sure to be difficult, if not impossible.

I would miss Mrs. Flowers, for she had given me her secret word which...was to serve me all my life: books.

Easy reading is damn hard writing." —

If someone from politics got up to give a lecture on New Guinea without having read the literature in the field or been there, the anthropologists would be horrified out of their wits, and properly so. Yet these people get up and lecture on social systems without having read Trotsky or Lenin or Hook. A hell of an attitude for people who make a fetish of scholar!

Meg Cabot is the best author ever

Reader, I married him. Ha! I've always wanted to write that!

Tina is so mad at Charlotte Brontë. She says Jane Eyre ruined her life.

I don't know why anyone has a living room when they could have a library instead.

books are passports to a deeper knowledge and understanding of the world

It is a hunger with me, books. I had rather read than eat, I do think.

He could now inhabit the world of words, with, at the back of his melancholy, a solace he had not known before

In great thick dusty books he read And hardly ever went to bed Before it was eleven. - One Day When They Had Settled Down

It was Crabcalf who, surrounded and walled in by the hundreds of unsold copies of his ill-fated novel, felt that he if anyone should be the judge not only of literature, but all that went on behind the sordid scenes.

Prunesquallor was in his study.