Quotes About Literature

The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form.

I got through my childhood in a delirium of literary exaltations.

I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.

A writer is first of all a reader. It is from reading that I derive the standards by which I measure my own work and according to which I fall lamentably short.

To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought

El más lógico de los estetas del siglo XIX, Mallarmé, afirmó que en el mundo todo existe para culminar en un libro. Hoy todo existe para culminar en una fotografía.

No book is worth reading once if it is not worth reading many times.

That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarmé, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

I wish I had devoted all of my time writing to literature. Those essays in the 60's, they were insolent, you know, like a young persons work. I wouldn't mind if the essays, at some point, evaporated. I think fiction .. I think literature .. I think narrative, is what lasts. I do believe that there is such a thing as truth. But I prefer the mode in which truth appears in art or literature. In literature a truth is something who's opposite is also true.

What do I believe? In the private life, in holding up culture, in music, Shakespeare, old buildings…

La fotografía en un libro es, obviamente, la imagen de una imagen.

I discovered a lot of writers in the Modern Library editions, which were sold in a Hallmark-card store, and I used to save up my allowance and would buy them all. I even bought real lemons like Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations [laughing]. I thought everything in the Modern Library must be great.

It is often asserted that "the West" has increasingly come to see war itself as a spectacle. Reports of the death of reality—like the death of reason, the death of the intellectual, the death of serious literature—seem to have been accepted without much reflection by many who are attempting to understand what feels wrong, or empty, or idiotically triumphant in contemporary politics and culture.

Pašovi invited me to see his Grad (City), a collage, with music, of declamations, partly drawn from texts by Constantine Cavafy, Zbigniew Herbert, and Sylvia Plath, using a dozen actors;

This bourgeois conjunction of sign and signified is apparent in the dramatic rescue of the classics offered in advertisements for gilt-and-leather volumes of "The World's Greatest Literature.

Annie's other prized book lay nearby—a copy of Lord of the Flies, a vintage clothbound volume in a sturdy slipcase, one of three copies she possessed. She hoped the reporter wouldn't ask about that.

The list of side effects was lengthy and horrible. Sonnet had pored over it, along with all the other literature she'd hastily devoured, searching for grains of hope. The worst part of chemo started after the drugs were administered.

She read voraciously, devouring a dog-eared copy of The Handmaid's Tale it one sleepless night.

I read books, …Like, all the time.

I read sixty books last year." "Geez," he said. "Why?" "'Cause there wasn't time to read more

With his long hair as ragged as rain and as black as thunder, he would have looked quite at home upon a windswept moor, or lurking in some pitch-black alleyway, or perhaps in a novel by Mrs. Radcliffe.

I am a Book," said Vinculus, stopping in mid-caper. "I am the Book. It is the task of the Book to bear the words. Which I do. It is the task of the Reader to know what they say.

Did you ever look into an English novel? Well, do not trouble yourself. It is nothing but a lot of nonsense about girls with fanciful names getting married.