Quotes About Literature

Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed.

For true contentment, one must carry a book at all times.

Children did not abandon comics; comics, in their drive to attain respect and artistic accomplishment, abandoned children.

Literary talent is an accident of birth, like the ability to spot four-leaf clovers, and about as meaningful in the absence of hard work.

I'd wanted to work in a true, old-fashioned bookshop, crammed with the mingled smells of literature and Pittsburgh blowing in through the open door. Instead I'd got myself hired by Boardwalk Books.

The truth is that comic-book creators have simply lost the habit of telling stories to children. And how sad is that?

Michael Chabon

Michael Connelly

Good novels are not written, they're rewritten!

She lays the book face down on her chest. Already her bedroom (no, their bedroom) feels more densely inhabited, more actual, because a character named Mrs. Dalloway is on her way to buy flowers.

He is still, at times, astonished by her. She may be the most intelligent woman in England, he thinks. Her books may be read for centuries.

Men may congratulate themselves for writing truly and passionately about the movements of nations; they may consider war and the search for God to be great literature's only subjects; but if men's standing in the world could be toppled by an ill-advised choice of hat, English literature would be dramatically changed.

She could, she thinks, have entered a different life. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.

She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.

Esto, piensa Virginia, es el autentico logro; lo que sobrevivirá después de que se haya marchitado el oropel de los experimentos narrativos

But then again, in addition to paper and cardboard...a little illuminated box, that contains thousands and thousands of stories? People aren't fascinated by that? Really?

Some of us, alas, are destined to find our escapes in novels, not life.

As with a love affair, the battered heart needs time to recover from a good work of fiction.

As a teenager, I virtually memorized my paperback editions, greedy for insider tips about the literary life. Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, Colette, Waugh—they were all there. What has stuck with me the most over the years is their almost universal insistence on the importance of revision, of revising and revising again.

One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which is the child room door. The critics will never forgive you such. The great Rudyard Kipling is one of a number of people to have suffered from this. I keep wondering to myself what this peculiar contempt towards anything related to childhood is all about.

Ahora bien, es un hecho conocido que, a veces, los libros se tienen entre sí un odio mortal. Aún tratándose de libros enteramente normales, cualquiera que tenga un poco de tacto no colocará Justine junto a Heidi ni Las leyes tributarias junto a La historia interminable, aunque, naturalmente, los libros normales no pueden oponerse a eso...

Jak siÄ™ zastanowisz, to bÄ™dziesz musiaÅ' przyzna?, ?e wszystkie historie Å›wiata skÅ'adajÄ… siÄ™ tylko z dwudziestu szeÅ›ciu liter. Litery sÄ… wci?? te same, tylko zmienia siÄ™ ich zestawienie. Å» liter tworzy siÄ™ sÅ'owa, ze sÅ'ów zdania, ze zdaÅ" rozdziaÅ'y, a z rozdziaÅ'ów historie.

Por cierto, había entre ellas un pequeño monstruo particularmente repugnante: el llamado juzgalibros, que en lenguaje popular recibe también el nombre de sabidillo y quisquilla. Estos espíritus pequeños suelen pasar su vida poniendo reparos a los libros. Todavía no se ha logrado establecer con certeza para qué existen tales criaturas...

Isn't it rather terrible that what brings the pricking behind my eyelids is not old Eddy's death, or even the thought of human mortality in general, but certain strokes of rhetoric – certain alliterations, repetitions, and verbal sonorities which don't hold any literal meaning for me? I'm more moved by literature than by what it describes!