Quotes About Literature

Nel suo superno mondo dei libri, non c'era guerra, non c'erano malintesi: c'era solo l'eterno sapere e voler sempre più sapere in fatto di numeri e parole, di titoli e nomi.

Besides, isn't it confoundedly easy to think you're a great man if you aren't burdened with the slightest idea that Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante or Napoleon ever lived?

je sais que les livres sont faits pour unir les hommes par-delà la mort et nous défendre contre l'ennemi le plus implacable de toute vie, l'oubli.

After another minute Reuben brought forth the following sentence: 'I ha' scranleted two hundred furrows come five o'clock down i' the bute.' It was a difficult remark, Flora felt, to which to reply. Was

On the whole, Cold Comfort was not without its promise of mystery and excitement.

Well, when I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good as  Persuasion, but with a modern setting, of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it. If anyone asks me what I work at, I shall say, 'Collecting material'. No one can object to that. Besides, so I shall be.

I found, after spending ten years as a journalist, learning to say exactly what I meant in short sentences, that I must learn, if I was to achieve literature and favourable reviews, to write as though I were not quite sure about what I meant but was jolly well going to say something all the same in sentences as long as possible.

To tidy up takes time, and she wants all her time for wolfing books...

though it was too true that life as she is lived has a way of being curiously different from life as described by novelists.

Hetty was eating, rather than reading, large slabs of a very thin book of contemporary verse each page having a thick wodge of print, without capital letters, starting at the top and running nearly to the bottom. Her eyes were very close to the book and she frowned with concentration.

Human beings: except inasmuch as they provided material for writers, what a bloody nuisance they were.

A good book is an event in my life.

Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore.

The short story can be hot and sweet or hot and fierce. You get it in one sitting or you don't get it. It's like a shore break. It happens quickly, and is right there in front of you, menacing you. First you're looking at the shore break, and then if you don't back up, it's on you. The novel is the long, low wave that you ride south from the Arctic Circle. It's powerful, but its power accumulates over a very long time as it rolls towards the reef.

Everyone probably thinks that I'm a raving nymphomaniac, that I have an insatiable sexual appetite, when the truth is I'd rather read a book.

Good books tell the truth, even when they're about things that never have been and never will be. They're truthful in a different way

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.

Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.

Yet do not miss the moral, my good men. For Saint Paul says that all that's written well Is written down some useful truth to tell. Then take the wheat and let the chaff lie still.