Quotes About Literature

Ultimately, I would love to do 'The Emperor of Ocean Park' by Stephen Carter.

My senior year at College Park, University of Maryland, I took an elective class in crime fiction taught by Charles C. Mish. He turned me on in a big way to reading and books. I was lucky to have a teacher who changed the course of my life.

I think every writer of detective fiction writing today has been influenced by Mr. Parker. I'm of a generation that followed Robert Parker, and it was impossible to read the genre and not be influenced by him.

I love kids that come to shows, little kids coming up to you with braces; like, some kid came up to me in a parking lot outside a show in Santa Cruz - he was about 14 or 15 - and he said, 'Y'know, I love 'The Basketball Diaries,' but I hope your next book of poetry isn't gonna be as academic as 'Living at the Movies' was.'

There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.

I would have to say the novel 'War and Peace' influenced me more than any other book. This greatest of novels demonstrated to me the enormous power of literature and fired me up with a desire to become a writer, to participate in what I considered then to be the greatest of all endeavors.

My mother was an English teacher and she imbibed the habit of reading, and encouraged me to participate in debates and the like.

I don't want security guards. I don't think security guards are particularly good for your writing.

Interestingly, although the 'Books of Blood' were greeted with cries of righteous horror - and smirks - I didn't think of them as being particularly excessive. God knows what I did think was excessive at the time, but I didn't think they were.

When people talk about being a writer, the first words that come to mind are glamour and artistic parties like Charles Dickens used to mix cocktails for.

A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.

I've started to read more factual books, partly because I didn't go to university.

I don't have an e-reader. One reason is that I like to dog-ear the page when I find a particularly good sentence or passage.

I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story.

They were the books to read, 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings.' A rite of passage going through life.

By the time I went to college, I knew the major passages of the Bible pretty much by heart.

I get letters from college kids who have read Percy Jackson when they were younger who tell me, 'I just passed my Classics exam.' The books are accurate enough that they can serve as a gateway to Homer and Virgil.

Sometimes he would advise me to read poetry, and would send me in his letters quantities of verses and whole poems, which he wrote from memory. 'Read poetry,' he wrote: 'poetry makes men better.' How often, in my later life, I realized the truth of this remark of his! Read poetry: it makes men better.

It was publicly banned and burned by citizens, it was debated on national radio; but above all, it was read.

My life is littered with copies of Moby Dick.

I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.

She thought, instead, with longing of more books—of buying books—of slipping into a narrative of other people's lives. That was release.

One of the many innovations of modernism was the new demands it placed on the audience. Music, painting, literature, even architecture, would never again be quite so 'easy' as they had been.

From 1781, by which time Goethe had been in Weimer for six years, he confided to Charlotte that he no longer felt able to address her as "Sie," and must use the more intimate "du." This brought about a sea change. As one critic put it, Goethe's letters now became "prose poems of happy love with few parallels in any literature.