Quotes About Literature

It's odd for me to compare my stuff to Lee Child's, because I'm such of fan of his, and also because it's curiously something I never did until I kept hearing about our protagonists' similarities.

I wrote the Dickens book because I loved Dickens, not because I felt a kinship with him, but after writing the book it seemed to me that there was at least one similarity between us and that was that Dickens loved to write and wrote with the ease and conviction of breathing. Me, too.

When I was in high school, I read all of Neil Simon's plays.

Simon is clearly in the tradition of romantic archetypes, your Darcys, your Heathcliffes.

It's funny, I don't know where I would place myself in the literary landscape. I really just write the book that I would want to read. I put on the blinders, and I really - it is, for me, that simple.

I have always tried to write in a simple way, using down-to-earth and not abstract words.

Biography is, simply, the orphan of academia.

I simply write with an intelligent reader in mind. I don't think about how old they are.

Many readers know my work first through 'Housekeeping,' simply because it was my only novel for a pretty long time.

What's going on? On the one hand, analogical thinking seems to be our birthright. Metaphorical connections saturate our language, drive our science, enliven our literature, burst out (at least occasionally) in children's speech, and remind us of things past. On the other hand, when experimentalists lead the horse to water, they can't make it drink.

Colonel L., in whose eyes I was a first-rate Riot Acter or, worse, an intellectual—in his phrase, "someone who reads books"—the most damning appraisal that could be made of a junior lieutenant.

That was what I did at night. I read all the stuff that you're supposed to read in college but never do, or if you do, you're not paying attention. I read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Turgenev. I read Cervantes and Flaubert and Stendhal and Knut Hamsun, and I read every American except Faulkner.

Tolstoy had thirteen kids and wrote War and Peace.

Tolstoy had 13 kids and still wrote War & Peace.

What appeared as unendurable hardship to soldiers of other nationalities produced a species of exhilaration in our lads, raised on a diet of Kipling and institutional porridge. Some

A good tutor can make one's college experience a revolutionary passage, to life as well as to literature; a bad one can make it misery.

I read War and Peace, I read Madame Bovary, I read Fathers and Sons, The Red and the Black, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov. I read Hunger, Anna Karenina, Don Quixote. I read Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, Sexus, Nexus, Plexus, Quiet Days in Clichy. I read Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. My friend Paul is a character in this one.

The Greeks' sculpture and athletics celebrated the human form, their literature and music human passion, their discourse and philosophy human reason. In

That's how I feel now, here in California, in my little house behind the big house. I have my list of approved players—Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, Melville, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Harper Lee, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Homer, Plato, Xenophon, Shakespeare, King David.

I read R.D. Laing, I read Victor Frankl. Anything by Ken Kesey or Peter Matthiessen, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, R. Crumb, Bob Dylan. These sacred texts are passed from one hand to another like relics of a religious past or harbingers of a new faith.

What music is to the spirit, reading is to the mind

A Escrita é, no entanto, muito mais do que 'a pintura da voz' como queria Voltaire. Tornou-se a suprema ferramenta do conhecimento humano (ciência), agente cultural da sociedade (literatura), meio de expressão democrática e informação popular (a imprensa) e uma forma de arte em si (caligrafia), para mencionar apenas algumas manifestações.

Elmore Leonard

I am still able to recite long portions of Alfred Noyes's "The Highwayman" at the slightest provocation.