Quotes About Literature

My first and most loved real novel was 'Little Women.' I identified with the Jo character even though we were opposites. Jo was very strong-minded and brave, and I was shy and kind of a wuss, everyplace but in my own home. I wanted to be Jo. She was my alter ego. I think reading that book gave me courage.

When sex is necessary for the plot of a book, or a character development, then I don't shy away from it. Why should I?

There aren't many shy writers left.

I was too shy to do anything but read, but there was nobody to tell me what to read.

I had no inclination to perform as a kid. I was a shy child - I always had my nose in a library book. I didn't start acting until I went to college. Once I started, it seemed to fit like a glove. I felt completely at home on stage. It was the perfect way for me to express myself, even better than writing.

I was always someone who wanted to write. I was a real shy, bookworm-ish kid, and I think my earliest stuff was fairly dark.

I'm embarrassed to say this, but I shy away from memoirs. My feeling is always that I'm saving them for later, so I guess that means I'll reach a point when I read nothing else.

Sibling relationships figure in a lot of my books. You don't often see relationships between adult siblings explored in fiction.

I do feel that the boys are getting left out. Girls will read boys' books, but boys won't read girls' books. If you're writing for a girl, you've got most of the audience on your side anyway.

Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.

A writer can be identified just through his sigh, as a mouthful of words are flooded out in his single sigh.

It took a brave editor in the U.S. to sign a contract for Dancing Girls, and without her belief in the book, I'm not sure it would ever have found its way into print.

I don't sign contracts for my books.

If I don't have words, it's a sign I'm not reading enough.

Some people are just so happy to get published to, they sign anything. Next thing you know, they've signed over the rights to their book.

I'd love a signed first edition of 'City of Glass' by Paul Auster. My favourite book of all time.

There's nothing like meeting a girl at a signing and her telling me that she loves reading now, and she's even writing her own stories.

Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.

Your basic, well-made novel by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen just bores me silly.

When you read about the lives of other people, people of different circumstances or similar circumstances, you are part of their lives for that moment. You inhabit their lives, and you feel what they're feeling, and that is compassion. If we see that reading does allow us that, we see how absolutely essential reading is.

'Pride And Prejudice' takes place in a similar period to 'Vanity Fair,' and yet there's a huge difference between Jane Austen and Thackeray.

I always imagine that if I met Dr. Seuss, he would be very similar to Crispin Glover.

Horror fans are a particular breed. They analyze films with such detail and expertise that I am reminded of the Canadian literary critic Northrup Frye, who approached literature with similar archetypal analysis.

You perhaps know me as a novelist. Literature is one of the arts - in fact, the noblest of the arts. That is not my opinion; it was first expressed by the ancients. As art, literature has many similarities with the other art forms.