Quotes About Literature

L'écriture permettait d'accumuler les connaissances

I can remember exactly where I sat when my teacher first read Roald Dahl's 'James and the Giant Peach'.

I think almost every writer in the world would hope that books would be always talked about with respect and civility and depth and seriousness.

The counsellor who never reads a novel or never opens a book of poetry is neglecting an important resource for empathic development.

David A. Adler

Allen Ginsberg was a world authority on the writing of William Blake, and had an incredible knowledge of classic literature and world politics.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti had a tremendous education as an artist and also an enormous knowledge of literarture.

The one on the right had an occasional table beside it with an ashtray, a pipe and a very old hardback edition of Sense and Sensibility. I figured that had been his chair since he was eight years old, when he had his first pipe and got hooked on Jane Austen.

New Zealand HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited P.O.

Why can't people just sit and read books and be nice to each other?

You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who have ever been alive.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.

There is indeed a strange prejudice against Quotation.

The present supply of realism is nothing but the publisher's answer to a cheap and fickle demand...if realism be a form of art, the newspaper is a permanent contribution to literature.

Yes, I repeat, there is always something to be done with words, and here are thirty-two authentic words from the Master Philologist himself, not to speak of three commas and a full-stop. Oh, I shall certainly go far with this.

Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.

To make a love story, you need a couple of young people, but to reflect on the nature of love, you're better off with old ones. That is a fact of life and literature - and of the novel ever since it fell in love with love in the 18th century.

in the years ahead discover his métier as a writer, that enduring profession of skilled liars

Like a book completely intact but missing one word every dozen, making it a miserable and confusing read.

when you were barely five years old you begged me to let you read that Stephen King novel and I made you stick to Judy Blume.

That girl loved to read like no one else, and she was making up for the months they spent literally running for their lives, when books were few and far between. The digital kind were all long gone, as far as Mark could guess—wiped away when the computers and servers all fried. Trina read the old-school paper kind.

then reading for an hour in bed (the latest seven-inch-thick fantasy novel he'd checked out from the library),

In our technology-dominated world, the value of literature is getting harder and harder to maintain, but it must be maintained if we're going to have any humanity left at all.

No one has claim to originality in literature; all writers are more or less faithful amanuenses of the spirit, translators and annotators of pre-existing archetypes.