Quotes About Literature

When I write plays, I'm already seeing the shapes on stage, of the actors and their interaction, and so on and so forth. I don't think I've ever written one play as an abstract piece, as a literary piece, floating in the air somewhere, to be flushed out later on.

It is the interest one takes in books that makes a library. And if a library have interest it is; if not, it isn't.

I have a long-term interest in the humanities.

One of the more interesting things I've learnt since becoming a writer is that if you like the book, you'll generally like the person. It doesn't always work in reverse - there are huge numbers of lovely people out there writing not very good books.

E-books are great for instant gratification - you see a review somewhere of a book that interests you, and you can start reading it five minutes later.

I loved books; I read my childhood away. I was more interested in my interior world.

Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.

And literature frequently rises to heights that make it international.

When a French book becomes an international hit it is because of the author and not because of the language. The same goes for movies.

Dominant and emerging forms of interpersonal communication have to find their way into literary language somehow - think of the epistolary novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

You can't read Proust at the Laundromat.

writers all had drinking problems in the twentieth century, and once she got the $1,080 check, she was obviously a writer and it was obviously the twentieth century, so of course she had a drinking problem.

She could get published in a sound journal that meant business and didn't publish fly-by-nights. She was twenty-eight. It was time for her to O.D., not get published.

Also they have this nervous feeling that anyone with tits like that must be vulgar. Or insensitive. There I sit, reading my Proust and minding my p's and q's and keeping up with current oddities—no slouch more or less—and I see them shrink from my gaze as though I were a tramp.

For the first six months, all whe wanted was honest labor, finely crafted novels, and surf.

One of the greatest was the blonde, urbane Ina Claire, who seemed a Dorothy Parker story or New Yorker cartoon come to life.

From the point of view of this relatively new and inchoate academic presence, then, the gay studies movement, what distinctive soundings are to be reached by posing the question our way—and staying for an answer? Let's see how it sounds. Has there ever been a gay Socrates? Has there ever been a gay Shakespeare? Has there ever been a gay Proust? Does the Pope wear a dress? If these questions startle, it is not least as tautologies.

We will not have any Dickens today… but tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. Let us read Little Dorrit again.

As for literatureIt gives no man a sinecure.And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece."And give up verse, my boy,There's nothing in it."

Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindside-before-ness, no straddled adjectives (as "addled mosses dank"), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing—nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say.

Better mendacitiesThan the classics in paraphrase!

An epic is a poem including history.

His true Penelope was Flaubert,He fished by obstinate isles.

Poetry must be as well written as prose.