Quotes About Literature

I have never had the lust to meet famous authors; the best of them is in their books.

Amply described blowjobs and anal scenes may stigmatise gay writers.

Lance was to computer programming what Joyce was to literature, possibly profound but also baffling.

Yosef Tversky, the son of a rabbi, despised religion and loved Russian literature, and found a great deal of amusement in what came out of the mouths of his fellow human beings. His father had turned away from an early career in medicine, Amos explained to friends, because "he thought animals had more real pain than people and complained a lot less.

I am a commercial writer and I'm proud of that. I am writing things to be put in the bookstore next month. I think it is a mistake to try to write for the ages.

One avoids becoming a Tolkien clone precisely by returning to the same roots that inspired The Lord of the Rings.

I think the notion of worldbuilding is a failure of literary sophistication.

the first rule of Moritz Haupt for interpreting the classics,—'Man soll nicht übersetzen.' ['Do not translate':

As always, books are mystical creatures to him.

I was a man fifteen years older than she, you understand. I had reached that stage in life where I identified with cynical villains in a book.

Ora li amava, questi libri rilegati con i dorsi all'italiana, i frontespizi, le illustrazioni ad acquerello, le copertine telate, amava il loro odore, perfino i loro scricchiolii quando li apriva in fetta, quasi si rompesse una serie di minuscole ossa invisibili.

plucked the antlered hat of fire from his head.

At one point he put his nose close to a volume called Raymond, or Life and Death by Sir Oliver Hodge.

the damage done by the specification of particulars may be irremediable. Meticulous detailing may obscure beyond recall a subject like history, literature, or philosophy. Speaking more generally, the belief that, since particulars are more tangible, their knowledge offers a true conception of things is fundamentally mistaken.

Herta Muller, Mo Yan, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio - for many of us, the Nobels have become doubly educational: We simultaneously learn of an author's existence and find out that we ought to have been reading him or her all along.

I have a bad habit of reading more than one book simultaneously!

Literature - novels, plays, and poems - can have an uncanny dual life, where they simultaneously represent something eternal and something historical, and this is often how they are taught in school.

No murder or sin or act of barbarism or cruelty has ever been committed by a person fully absorbed in the reading of a book. By this fact alone, we can conclude that readers are nicer people, at least until they put the book down. When we are reading, we are better.

Isaac Singer was born in Poland and doesn't write in English. Still, he's an American.

It was at Juilliard that I realized that being a singer encompasses so many things that I am interested in. Literature, languages, physics, history, art. You really get to explore so many things.

A young female essayist saying they're influenced by Joan Didion is like a young female singer-songwriter saying they're influenced by Joni Mitchell.

I don't really remember my folks singing to us, but they read to us.

I always enjoy impersonating my characters in the first-person singular.

Shirley Jackson enjoyed notoriety and commercial success within her lifetime, and yet it still hardly seems like enough for a writer so singular. When I meet readers and other writers of my generation, I find that mentioning her is like uttering a holy name.