Quotes About Literature

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A novel is like a sausage. You might like the final taste, but you probably don't want to see how it was made.

She explained to him her theory that people we now consider "on the spectrum" were, in the past, the geniuses in art, science, and literature, but now, with medications and diagnoses, we flatten them out, make them more uniform, dull their senses.

Science fiction used to be a dangerous literature. Now, it is a very commercial genre, and whatever dangers might still lurk within seem to have been safely sanitized for the marketplace. The real crime is that the lobotomy has been self performed. [David Gerrold - Afterword]

Story after story has marched the same old WASP engineer paperdoll through the same old story lines, most of which were very good when they were used by H. G. Wells, but which are now showing signs of wear.

Es un error pensar que la ciencia ficción es un campo literario salvaje que se aparta de los caminos conocidos; puede ser un ingrediente más de cualquier tipo de ficción, del mismo modo que la ciencia y las tecnologías actuales forman parte integrante de nuestras vidas en todos sus aspectos.

The problem isn't what to say about the incredible Ursula Le Guin, it's where to start.

A writer who writes more than he reads is an amateur.

But that was twenty years ago, and with the exception of EQMM (still indisputably the fountainhead of significant mystery fiction throughout the civilized world), most of the magazines I listed above are dead. Crumbling yellow pulp relics in my files, dropping brittle little triangles from page corners.

Science fiction used to be a dangerous literature. Now, it is a very commercial genre, and whatever dangers might still lurk within seem to have been safely sanitized for the marketplace. The real crime is that the lobotomy has been self performed. I

Pipe down cunt

Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.

We can be reluctant to recognize how much of our culture was literary, particularly now that so many of the institutional purveyors of literature happily have joined in proclaiming its death. A substantial number of Americans who believe they worship God actually worship three major literary characters: the Yahweh of the J Writer (earliest author of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers), the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark, and Allah of the Koran.

The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only the best of what has been written.

No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.

We read, I think, to repair our solitude, though pragmatically the better we read, the more solitary we become. 

I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.

Leggiamo per porre rimedio alla nostra solitudine, anche se poi, di fatto, la nostra solitudine cresce parallelamente all'aumentare e all'approfondirsi delle nostre letture. Non riuscirei proprio a considerare il leggere come un vizio, ma va concesso che non si tratta neppure di una virtù.

Infinite Jest' is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it.

José] Saramago for the last 25 years stood his own with any novelist of the Western world [..] He was the equal of Philip Roth, Gunther Grass, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. His genius was remarkably versatile — he was at once a great comic and a writer of shocking earnestness and grim poignancy. It is hard to believe he will not survive.

Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden

I myself do not believe that the Torah is any more or less the revealed Word of God than are Dante's Commedia, Shakespeare's King Lear, or Tolstoy's novels, all works of comparable literary sublimity

One breaks into the canon only by aesthetic strength.

You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock.