Quotes About Literature

Più che per qualsiasi altro scrittore, in Shakespeare le parole sono separate dalla vita. Era un uomo così bravo a nascondere ciò che provava che non possiamo nemmeno essere sicuri che provasse qualcosa. Sappiamo che usava le parole con enorme efficacia, e possiamo ragionevolmente supporre che avesse dei sentimenti. Quello che non sappiamo, e che possiamo soltanto tirare a indovinare, è dove le due cose si intersecavano.

It is true that William Shakespeare used some learned parlance in his work, but he also employed imagery that clearly and ringingly reflected a rural background. Jonathan Bate quotes a couplet from Cymbeline, "Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney sweepers, come to dust," which takes on additional sense when one realizes that in Warwickshire in the sixteenth century a flowering dandelion was a golden lad, while one about to disperse its seeds was a chimney sweeper.

The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., contains about seven thousand works on Shakespeare—twenty years' worth of reading if read at the rate of one a day—and, as this volume slimly attests, the number keeps growing.

Brian Aldiss

If we take the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as our guide, then Shakespeare produced roughly one-tenth of all the most quotable utterances written or spoken in English since its inception—a clearly remarkable proportion.

his facetious grace in writing," and much else.

If the Chandos portrait is not genuine, then we are left with two other possible likenesses to help us decide what William Shakespeare looked like. The first is the copperplate engraving that appeared as the frontispiece of the collected works of Shakespeare in 1623—the famous First Folio.

it was the arts, those noble expressions of the human spirit that are communicated through literature, dance, song, film, drama, painting and sculpture, among the many other such creative means, that helped articulate the sufferings of [these] people that were heard around the globe.

Later, after Rule became famous, she stopped writing those kind of books and started writing about a different kind of true-crime case. She started writing about real-life gothic soap operas, dream-come-true husbands who turn out to have a dark past and crap. I don't have any interest in those crimes or those books, which I think are written for women, and I haven't been able to read anything she's written in 25 years, although I keep trying.

I'm not a Christian, but I have read his book.

How in the world could there be any science in scripture. There cannot be because the two historical periods are separated by so much. (Modern science began in 2000 AD and the scriptures were written BC, well before that). The scriptures are NOT teaching science. It's very hard for me to accept not just a literal interpretation of scripture but a fundamentalist approach to religious belief. It's kind of a play, It presents itself as science.

I'm a man of few words. If you read more, you might have a larger vocabulary.

I give you real world-changers like Homer, Jack Kirby, and the aforementioned Shakespeare as the archangels of pure story.

High School is the place where poetry goes to die.

C'è nessuno che voglia unirsi a me nel lanciare alcuni sassi verso quegli insegnanti che amano porre la domanda: «Che cosa sta cercando di dire il poeta?» come se Thomas Hardy e Emily Dickinson si fossero sforzati ma alla fine avessero fallito: disgraziati incapaci di parlare, che altro non erano, con la penna in bocca a guardare fuori dalla finestra in attesa d'un idea

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

Wagon Train was on. It seemed to be beaming in from some foreign country. I shut that off, too, and went into another room, a windowless one with a painted door--a dark cavern with a floor-to-ceiling library. I switched on the lamps. The place had an overpowering presence of literature and you couldn't help but lose your passion for dumbness.

James Joyce seemed like the most arrogant man who ever lived, had both his eyes wide open and great faculty of speech, but what he say, I knew not what.

Then she says, You don't read women authors do ya? At least that's what I think I hear her say. Well, I said, how would you know and what would it matter anyway. Well, she says you just don't seem like you do. I said you're way wrong. She says which ones have you read then. I say I've read Erica Jong.

You've been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books, you're very well read, it's well known.

The place had an overpowering presence of literature and you couldn't help but lose your passion for dumbness.

How good is your writing? The best idea in the world has to be supported by solid writing.

Authors produce the books. Readers consume the books.  Everyone else is in the middle.  And therefore, very, very nervous. 

You can market your book, but you can't sell your book. The only book we've ever seen being successfully "sold" by selling methods is the Encyclopedia.