Quotes About Literature

Qué aporta la literatua: escuchar una voz humana.

No. We never have read a line of Tolstoy. We studiously avoid doing so.

When I was young my Father used to tell me that the two most worthwhile pursuits in life were the pursuit of truth and of beauty and I believe that Alfred Nobel must have felt much the same when he gave these prizes for literature and the sciences.

Japan is the first nation in the world to accord 'comic books'--originally a 'humorous' form of entertainment mainly for young people--nearly the same social status as novels and films.

I perceived quite early that I was a reader, and most of the people I came into contact with were not. It made a barrier. What they wanted to talk about were things they had eaten, touched, or done. What I wanted to talk about was what I had read.

That's really what SF is all about, you know: the big reality that pervades the real world we live in: the reality of change. Science fiction is the very literature of change. In fact, it is the only such literature we have.

the conventional sociology of literature or culture, which modestly limits itself to the identification of class motifs or values in a given text, and feels that its work is done when it shows how a given artifact "reflects" its social background, is utterly unacceptable.

The world of science and the world of literature have much in common. Each is an international club, helping to tie mankind together across barriers of nationality, race and language. I have been doubly lucky, being accepted as a member of both.

The dog may be wonderful prose, but only the cat is poetry.

Currently she was midway through a bittersweet David Nicholls novel that any other time might well have made her self-indulgently reflective.

Reading functions as hallucinating a meaning between letters and lines.

A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.

A good aphorism is too hard for the tooth of time, and is not worn away by all the centuries, although it serves as food for every epoch. Hence it is the greatest paradox in literature, the imperishable in the midst of change, the nourishment which always remains highly valued, as salt does, and never becomes stupid like salt.

A classical work of literature can never be completely understood. But those who are educated and educating themselves must always desire to learn more from it.

On remarquera sans peine que ce nouveau livre a la même contexture que nos précédents ouvrages, c'est-à-dire qu'il se compose d'essais plus ou moins indépendants les uns des autres, et d'importance inégale [...]

People who love books never have spare time!

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.... Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

If you can read, there is no worldly wisdom that cannot be gathered from the pages of a book.

sharing a book with others becomes a public enterprise. There

If you are a nice person and you are a writer, that's two strikes against you.

It was amazing how many books one could fit into a room, assuming one didn't want to move around very much.

If you are anything like me --- Clever, fond of goat cheese, and devilishly handsome --- then you have undoubtedly read many books.

There were books involved.