Quotes About Literature

A knowledge of general literature is one of the evidences of an enlightened mind; and to give an apt quotation at a fitting time, proves that the mind is stored with sentential lore that can always be used to great advantage by its possessor.

The hoary joke in the literary world, based on 'Dreams From My Father ' was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama, he could have made it as a writer.

The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one.

I can't read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up.

The function of the Society and of Department 17 is to keep track of all espionage and related acts recorded in literature. In other words, the Department reads spy thrillers and murder mysteries

The adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, a team generally regarded as seeking justice, can be compared to the adventures of Rex Stout's two most famous characters, Nero Wolf and Archie Goodwin.

Woe to our time, for the study of letters has perished from among us.

What if people come and take all the books away and melt them like they did to the motorcars?' 'Books don't melt.

I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's mortality.

Across the page the numbers moved in grave morrice, in the mummery of their letters, wearing quaint caps of squares and cubes.

Books don't repeat the same words over and over. The Gulliver's Travels whose whimsey amused you at twelve is not the Gulliver's Travels whose acid engaged you at thirty.

in sum, he had been satisfied reading Homer's Odyssey instead of setting off to create his own?

I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.

There are numerous cases of that, where one of our writers discovers another writer whom he likes, and we then take that book on. So it's a very close relationship. We can do that because we're so small.

A lot of novelists start late—Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you're young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can't be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing courses! The academics don't know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter.

I need a witch... I need a nerd... I need a...a librarian!

I wrote my first novel, McFarlane Boils The Sea, under the influence of Kelman and Proust, which is like drinking a cocktail of Bowmore and Châteauneuf du Pape. ( James Meek in interview with TMO )

the great thing about literature is that you can imagine; the great thing about film is that you can't.

as Kurt Vonnegut pointed out [...] the literary novel has become extraordinarily privatistic of late. It's as if the big issues (Does God exist? from whence springs decency? what sort of species is Homo Sapiens?) were either settled or not worth discusssing, and serious writers should therefore confine themselves to their various ethnic heritages and interpersonal relationships.

I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve.

Hard at work on a new one, huh? What's this one called?" "A Feast of Souls." "A Feast of Souls," Ben said. "Classy." I slowed, unsure whether or not I had detected a hint of sarcasm in my neighbor's tone.

In England, literary pretence is more universal than elsewhere from our method of education.

And what holds good of verse holds infinitely better in respect to prose.

Most books don't even come into the world with the noise of the still-born.