Quotes About Literature

When it comes to music, movies, literature, paintings, and even Bikram yoga, it's pretty easy to have an opinion about whether something has been copied. Software, on the other hand, was an awkward late addition to the original Copyright Act of 1976, shoehorned into section 102(a) as a 'literary work.'

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Of course, there are those critics - New York critics as a rule - who say, 'Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it's good but then she's a natural writer.' Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

I remain a fan of my friend Bret Easton Ellis's 'American Psycho.' I think as a book about New York in the '80s it was pretty excellent.

Whether it was H. P. Lovecraft's doomed towns or Shirley Jackson's lonely, looming 'The Haunting of Hill House,' the boondocks had all the fun. As a black kid in Queens, New York, I couldn't have felt more removed.

My husband and I are huge bibliophiles. He's always reading 'The New York Times Book Review' and then ordering 20 books online.

At graduation, I assumed I'd be in publishing, but first I went to England and got a master's degree in English Literature. And then I came back to New York and had a series of publishing jobs, the way one does.

Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.

If you appear in the 'Atlantic' or 'Harper's' or the 'New Yorker,' by God, you must be a writer, because everybody says so.

I stay up on current events. I read 'The New Yorker' and 'The Economist.' I go to community meetings to see what concerns the people in my neighborhood. I studied literature in college, so I also continue to read poetry, literature, and novels.

If you write chick lit, and if you're a New Yorker, and if your book becomes the topic of pop-culture fascination, the paper might make dismissive and ignorant mention of your book. If you write romance, forget about it. You'll be lucky if they spell your name right on the bestseller list.

I have published in 'The New Yorker,' 'Holiday,' 'Life,' 'Mademoiselle,' 'American Heritage,' 'Horizon,' 'The Ladies Home Journal,' 'The Kenyon Review,' 'The Sewanee Review,' 'Poetry,' 'Botteghe Oscure,' the 'Atlantic Monthly,' 'Harper's.'

My parents put the New Yorker in my crib. I saw Vogue and Vanity Fair around the house before I could read.

'The New Yorker's fiction podcast I like a lot, where they have authors pick short stories by other authors that appeared in 'The New Yorker.'

Although it's not something I'm particularly proud of, I'm willing to admit that, in addition to whiling away the long stretches of time in the air and waiting in airport lounges reading the 'New Yorker' and 'New York Times' on my Kindle, I've picked up the occasional tabloid magazine.

One of the nice things about 'The New Yorker' is they let you write stories that sometimes end up almost half a book.

When I was about 14, in about 1984, I decided to become a great poet. Faber & Faber was going to publish me, and when Ted Hughes read my first anthology he would invite me to Yorkshire for meat pies and mentorship.

One of the greatest gifts my brother and I received from my mother was her love of literature and language. With their boundless energy, libraries open the door to these worlds and so many others. I urge young and old alike to embrace all that libraries have to offer.

I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.

I've always been fascinated by books. When I was young, my grandfather used to hand out a book - which would be anything from a biography to a classic - to me every week and ask me to write a piece on what I thought about it. On the other hand, my mother used to love reading thrillers and bestsellers.

Whenever I would see horror movies I would be traumatized and I'd have to watch them behind my hands or behind the couch sometimes. So I grew up first with authors like John Bellairs and R.L. Stine for kind of the young adult horror. But I found Stephen King in the sixth grade and that was it. I became a rabid fan.

I thought I'd been condescended to as an Indian - that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing young adult literature.

I had never heard of 'young adult novels,' which I guess are about teenage gangs and the new boy in town or something.

Young adult fiction is getting more popular among adults because the writer is trying hard all the time to maintain the reader's interest.