Quotes About Literature

Books look handsome and it's a real singular experience getting to go to a bookstore. I don't want to not do that.

I know my 17-year-old self would read my bourgeois fiction, full of metaphors and rhythmic prose, with a sinking heart.

Most of my reading is based on what I'm working on. I did a series of paintings based on the seven deadly sins, so I read Dante and then Milton's 'Paradise Lost.' That was a bit hard going.

When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels.

It's hard to say when my interest in writing began, or how. My mother read to my sister and me every night, and we always loved playing make-believe games. I had a well-primed imagination. I didn't start thinking about writing as a serious pursuit, a career I could have, until after college.

'Black Beauty,' by Anna Sewell, remains a star-dusted memory because my mom read it aloud to my sister and me at night for months. I was no more than 7.

I didn't have any brothers or sisters, so I did a lot of stuff where I entertained myself playing games, reading a lot, a lot of fantasy novel stuff.

I love 'Jane Eyre,' and I love the Bronte sisters. I actually didn't read any of them until I was in college, so I don't have quite the same connection with them that I think a lot of women do.

I'm glad nobody has asked me to adapt 'Wuthering Heights' because I think I would make a mess of it. Everybody makes a mess of it. I think the Bronte Sisters are mad.

My first novel, 'You Must be Sisters,' was started in Pakistan. I've wrote several novels and a TV drama set or partly-set there.

I love the Bronte sisters, but I feel a closer kinship to the Ephron sisters, Nora and Delia, if only because their work makes me laugh more than the Brontes. I also love the Mitford sisters with their secret language and their endless letters back and forth.

I must confess I love female writers: Jane Austen, Isak Dinesen, Colette, Willa Cather, Dawn Powell, Joan Didion. I grew up on the Bronte sisters, and Daphne du Maurier.

The reason there's no modern-day Shakespeare is because he didn't have anything to do except sit in a room with a candle and think.

Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.

Read as much as you can, and then sit down and write.

I've got lots of books sitting here that have never been published because nobody could make any marketing sense of them.

Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.

I think situations are more important than plot and character.

I've got five or six unpublished stories kicking around looking for somebody to buy them.

Size has nothing to do with literature. All legs are long enough to touch the ground, and all books are big enough to fill their covers.

The catchword I use with my classes is: The authority of the writer always overcomes the skepticism of the reader.

Also, they don't understand - writing is language. The use of language. The language to create image, the language to create drama. It requires a skill of learning how to use language.

It's a real skill to take a piece of literature and make it in cinema. It's quite a different form, and I think I have to respect that.

Agatha Christie's writing is incredibly skillful because her books are incredibly intellectually puzzling and challenging.