Quotes About Literature

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

He valued life and literature equally for the light they threw upon each other; to his mind one implied the other; he was unable to conceive of them apart.

We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generositie.

I am 'sort of' haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world.

I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.

That was originally what I had loved him for: that at a period when our native land was nude and crude and provincial, when the famous 'atmosphere' it is supposed to lack was not even missed, when literature was lonely there and art and form akmost impossible, he had found the means to live and write like one of the first; to be free and general and not at all afraid; to feel, understand, and express everything.

If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to TWO children—? We

Leaves of Grass is] monstrous because it pretends to persuade the soul while it slights the intellect; because it pretends to gratify the feelings while it outrages the taste.

I don't believe they're very nice to girls; they're not nice to them in the novels.

It seemed to her at last that she would do well to take a book; formerly, when heavy-hearted, she had been able, with the help of some well-chosen volume, to transfer the seat of consciousness to the organ of pure reason.

The English are the most romantic people in the world.

It's very silly," she said, "but I go on with it in spite of myself. I'm afraid I'm too easily pleased; no novel is so silly I can't read it.

In literature we move through a blest world in which we know nothing except by style, but in which everything is saved by it.

Of late, it was not to be denied, literature had seemed a fading light....

The Turn of the Screw" has been turned and returned through a large number of critical approaches, perhaps only rivaled in this regard by Hamlet. The spectrum of critical approaches ranges from Freudian, to feminist, to gay, to materialist, partly because the complexity of the first-person narrative lends itself to analysis and partly because the tale also offers an engaging twist on the traditional genre of the ghost story.

arcipreste de Hita, en cuyo Libro de Buen Amor supo presentar (como Chaucer con sus obras en Inglaterra) una imagen fiel, a la vez que cargada de ingenio, de la vida de su tiempo.

I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul.

We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.

I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written thank God.

All I ask of life, he says, is a bunch of books, a bunch of dreams, and a bunch of cunt.

Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race

A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold.

Au fond, les gens ne lisent pas ; ou, s'ils lisent, ils ne comprennent pas ; ou, s'ils comprennent, ils oublient.

A man, when he's burning up with passion, wants to see things; he wants to see everything, even how they make water. And while it's all very nice to know that a woman has a mind, literature coming from the cold corpse of a whore is the last thing to be served in bed.