Quotes About Literature

With tobacco and literature one could face out any situation, provided, of course, that the book was not written in an unknown tongue.

Joyce has freed us from the superstition of syntax, agreed the curly man.

Ah! I have never regretted Paradise Lost since I discovered that it contained no eggs-and-bacon.

Do you find it easy to get drunk on words? So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober. Lord Peter Wimsey in Gaudy Night

Its scheme was black and primrose; its walls were lined with rare editions, and its chairs and Chesterfield sofa suggested the embraces of the houris.

Have some Oxford marmalade - and then I'll show you my Dante.

Dorothy L. Sayers

G. K. Chesterton says,' put in Wimsey, 'that most people with a very well-defined style write at times what looks like bad parodies of themselves. He mentions Swinburne, for instance – that bit about "From the lilies and languors of virtue to the raptures and roses of vice.

Reading maketh a full man—" "Conference a ready man," said Harriet. "And writing an exact man," said the Superintendent. "Mind that, Joe Sellon, and see you let me have them notes so as they can be read to make sense.

So, you're the man who can't spell 'fuck.' Dorothy Parker to Norman Mailer after publishers had convinced Mailer to replace the word with a euphemism, 'fug,' in his 1948 book, The Naked and the Dead.

I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours.

On Oscar Wilde:] If, with the literate, I am Impelled to try an epigram, I never seek to take the credit; We all assume that Oscar said it. [ Life Magazine, June 2, 1927]

There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.

And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.

You don't want a general houseworker, do you? Or a traveling companion, quiet, refined, speaks fluent French entirely in the present tense? Or an assistant billiard-maker? Or a private librarian? Or a lady car-washer? Because if you do, I should appreciate your giving me a trial at the job. Any minute now, I am going to become one of the Great Unemployed. I am about to leave literature flat on its face. I don't want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.

The nowadays ruling that no word is unprintable has, I think, done nothing whatever for beautiful letters. The boys have gone hog-wild with liberty, yet the short flat terms used over and over, both in dialogue and narrative, add neither vigor nor clarity; the effect is not of shock but of something far more dangerous — tedium.

Like many a better one before me, I have gone down under the force of numbers, under the books and books and books that keep coming out and coming out and coming out, shoals of them, spates of them, flash floods of them, too blame many books, and no sign of an end.

Tonstant Weader fwowed up.

His books are exciting and powerful and — if I may filch the word from the booksy ones — pulsing.

For years I have been crouching in corners hissing small and ladylike anathema of Theodore Dreiser.

They are sad books, filled with sad and skinless people. There are some who do not like such books. The world, too, is crowded with the sorrowful and the sensitive. There are many who do not like such a world.

When you're wondering whether you're obligated to finish a book, keep these wise words in mind: It is not a novel to be thrown aside lightly. It should be thrown aside with great force.

If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy.

If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy.