Quotes About Literature

Is the library all you hoped?" "It's a holy of holies," I said. And it was, but I could feel the tiny lump of anger tucked beneath my awe. A half million scrolls and codices were within these walls, and all but a handful were by men. They had written the known world.

Whenever I opened one, T. Ray said, "Who do you think you are, Julius Shakespeare?" The man sincerely thought that was Shakespeare's first name, and if you think I should have corrected him, you are ignorant about the art of survival.

A half million scrolls and codices were within these walls, and all but a handful were by men. They had written the known world.

Who do you think you are, Julius Shakespeare?" The man sincerely thought that was Shakespeare's first name, and if you think I should have corrected him, you are ignorant about the art of survival. He also referred to me as Miss Brown-Nose-in-a-Book and occasionally as Miss Emily-Big-Head-Diction. He meant Dickinson, but again, there are things you let go by.

Reading was a kind of freedom, the only one I could give

And it was, but I could feel the tiny lump of anger tucked beneath my awe. A half million scrolls and codices were within these walls, and all but a handful were by men. They had written the known world.

I]t contains a great deal that Sun Tzu did not write, and very little indeed of what he did.

latter accretions are not to be considered part of the original work. Tu Mu's assertion can certainly not be taken as proof. There is every reason to suppose, then, that the 13 chapters existed in the time of Ssu-ma

because commonsensically speaking, a room full of good books had to better for your health than a room with no books in it at all.

All five of our twentieth-century literature Nobel laureates were alcoholics—Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck.

If you are concerned for the future of our civilization, there is no more cheering sight than a boy or girl who is lost in a book. It's an image I cling to, in moments of depression: the absorbed child, reading.

I think something quite dreadful has been happening to criticism in the arts, particularly in America, during the last twenty years. In an age which is so much dominated by technological advance, the methods and even the jargon of science and engineering have mistakenly been adopted not only by fringe disciplines like psychology and social studies but by many arts scholars who should have known better. from In Defense of the Artist in Signposts to Criticism of Children's Literature (1983)

Sometimes a book has its day and, although of course it does not change, the reader does, as a result of having read better things, or new tastes having come to the fore, or fashions in literature having moved on. Other novels seem to have improved, usually because we have matured as readers, our imaginations have expanded and we understand new literary approaches, sometimes because of life events which have opened us up to a new emotional awareness and understanding.

Eucalyptus. Murray Bail. Someone told me that this was a great novel so I bought it, but then I discovered that it was great Australian novel so I put it away. I find it difficult to get to grips with Australian novels. Difficult, but not impossible.

Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.

Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.

Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.

Most of my reading is rereading.

To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That's what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.

Try not to live in a linguistic slum.

what I write is smarter than I am. Because I can rewrite it.

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours. Who would we be if we could not sympathize with those who are not us or ours? Who would we be if we could not forget ourselves, at least some of the time? Who would we be if we could not learn? Forgive? Become something other than we are?

If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.

Well, it does educate us about life. I wouldn't be the person I am, I wouldn't understand what I understand, were it not for certain books. I'm thinking of the great question of nineteenth-century Russian literature: how should one live? A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.