Quotes About Literature

Get black on white.

My favorite quotes; "The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector." - Ernst Hemingway. "We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master." Ernest Hemingway

The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most at this time. There is, of course, the problem of sustenance.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.

But, you say, there is very little conversation in this book. Why isn't there more dialoge? What we want in a book by this citizen is people talking; that is all he knows how to do and now he doesn't do it. The fellow is no philosopher, no savant, an incompetent zoologist, he drinks too much and cannot punctuate readily and now he has stopped writing dialogue. Some one ought to put a stop to him. He is bull crazy.

You can't live with literary characters no matter how much you might like to. You can have them as imaginary friends that you can call up when you need to. One of the tasks of art is to provide people with companions.

Coger un libro y perderme en el texto en los momentos difíciles ha sido siempre mi modo de buscar alivio, consuelo o, al menos, un respiro. Cuando los asuntos amorosos se torcían, echaba mano de un libro. Como consuelo después de un fracaso en el trabajo teatral o con textos cuyo final se me resistía, siempre he tenido los libros. Como linimento, pero más aún como instrumentos para desviar los pensamientos hacia otro lugar. Para hacer acopio de fuerzas.

Once more they had left their own time for another age. The age of Bellman, the bacchanalian 18th-century poet.

When I picked up a book that I had read many times before, the words opened themselves up again. What I was unable to cope with was the new and the unknown; but what I had read before, perhaps on several occasions, had the same effect as ever. I read and was able to stop thinking about my illness.

Creation signifies, above all, emotion, and that not in literature or art alone. We all know the concentration and effort implied in scientific discovery. Genius has been defined as an infinite capacity for taking pains.

Lee los mejores libros primero; lo más seguro es que no alcances a leerlos todos.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.

We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsmen who cannot read at all, and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem.

Two thousand summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them against the corrosion of time.

The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times

We go eastward to realize history, and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is a Lethan stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to forget the Old World and its institutions.

Hard and steady and engrossing labor with the hands, especially out of doors, is invaluable to the literary man and serves him directly.

The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity.

One who has just come from reading perhaps one of the best English books will find how many with whom he can converse about it? Or suppose he comes from reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original, whose praises are familiar even to the so-called illiterate; he will find nobody at all to speak to, but must keep silence about it.

Books which are books are all that you want, and there are but half a dozen in any thousand.