Quotes About Literature

Great books, if long enough and full of topical description and contemporary comment, were now coming into even wider public favor. The lengthier and fuller of comment, the better.

If the book's bad enough, they'll publish it, and if it's bad bad enough, the daily reviewers will love it, and it'll sell.

Music is the highest art, no question. But literature is a friendlier one. It depends on us more, bores us more quickly, can't go on if we don't, can't stop saying what it means, can't stop giving us something to forgive.

Es ist noch kein Buch

The Holy Scrinium was the private library of the popes, said to contain amazing volumes, both religious and otherwise, dating back to the founding of Christendom.

Read. Read everything in the genre in which you want to write, but don't limit yourself. Read broadly. The best teacher of writing is a good book.

[B]ut in literature, it should be remembered, a thing always becomes his at last who says it best, and thus makes it his own.

That you're Borges.' Manny laughed. 'Of course you are, you dumb shit. That's the whole point.

The semi-colon is a burp, a hiccup. It's a drunk staggering out of the saloon at 2 a.m., grabbing your lapels on the way and asking you to listen to one more story.

Good writers are good readers.

the first American Shakespeare expert, Richard Grant White

Smith elaborated on this a year later in a book, Bacon and Shakespeare, which claimed, among other things, that the plays were meant to be read, not staged;

WHEN SCHOLARS TALK ABOUT THE SOURCES OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS, they almost always mean printed books like Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles

what led Twain to this conclusion: a conviction that great fiction, including his own, was necessarily autobiographical.

By the early twentieth century, autobiography was fast establishing itself as a major form of imaginative writing

There's one good kind of writer -- a dead one.

Life is sad enough without people writing sad books.

But literature is one of those realms in which man asserts his freedom, his spirit: in literature of a first-rate order, man attains a kind of imaginative freedom in which he asserts, implicitly, that in his spirit, he will not be the slave of fate. He assimilates tragedy, sorrow, and bitterness.

An elegant sufficiency, content,Retirement, rural quiet, friendship, books.

There studious let me sit,And hold high converse with the mighty dead.

My father also happened to be an intellectual, as learned, literate, informed, and curious as anyone I have known. Unobtrusively and casually, he was my wise and gentle teacher.

I believe that it is better to know one book intimately that a hundred superficially

What about school then? Favorite subjects?" "History, I guess. English too," I said when he didn't answer. "But English is going to be really boring for the next six weeks?we stopped doing literature and went back to the grammar book and now we're diagramming sentences.

It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially." ? Donna Tartt, The Secret History