Quotes About Literature

Hemingway was a jerk.

I think it's Jerry's masterful fiction writing.

I'm the Jerry Lewis of crime fiction.

I was raised in rural south Jersey, and there was no culture there. There was a small library, and that was it. There was nothing else.

Writing about Jerusalem can be such a minefield.

Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?

I came from a classic, literate, intellectual Jewish family.

I'm hot on the Jewish book club circuit. How many black authors do you know who can say that?

I don't consider myself a Jewish writer.

Jim Murray's greatest writings were golf writings.

I'll never have so compelling a figure within my embrace as Joan of Arc; there will never be a book whose last chapter is so very hard to get right.

My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever.

I'm John Clare now. I was Byron and Shakespeare formerly.

The hoary joke in the literary world, based on 'Dreams From My Father,' was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama, he could have made it as a writer.

I often joke that I could write 'War and Peace' and make it sound like Geri Halliwell wrote it.

I've been joking that 'On the Road' is the prequel to 'The Road.' I don't know if that's a very good joke.

The concept of modernity in literary history was also related to the relation each Indian language and literature developed with English. Sanskrit and Persian literary models were labelled as traditional and medieval, and those found in English, irrespective of any period, as modern (page 22)

Sono posseduto da una passione inesauribile che finora non ho potuto né voluto frenare. Non riesco a saziarmi di libri.

Certamente la solitudine senza lettere è una prigione, ed è uno gravissimo supplizio; ma dàgli le lettere, e li è la patria, li è la libertade, li è il piacere.

Faced with the numbering logic of neoliberal regimes, literature offers an intervention in order to consider identity and voice, to consider representation in both the political and artistic sense of the term... [Literature and art] cultivate tension between an unresolved past and present, between invisibility and exposure, showing the dualities of face and mask that leave their trace on identitarian struggles today.

I've always found that the better the book I'm reading, the smarter I feel, or, at least, the more able I am to imagine that I might, someday, become smarter.

Too often students are being taught to read as if literature were some kind of ethics class or civics class—or worse, some kind of self-help manual. In fact, the important thing is the way the writer uses the language.

Reading Chekhov, I felt not happy, exactly, but as close to happiness as I knew I was likely to come. And it occurred to me that this was the pleasure and mystery of reading, as well as the answer to those who say that books will disappear. For now, books are still the best way of taking great art and its consolations along with us on a bus.

What's strange is how many beginning writers seem to think that grammar is irrelevant, or that they are somehow above or beyond this subject more fit for a schoolchild than the future author of great literature.