Quotes About Literature

Reading is a lot like physical exercise. Reading is a workout for the brain.

Sometimes, when I couldn't afford to pay the utility bill at the end of the month, I was forced to read by the light of the stories themselves.

Dan Franck's Bohemian Paris

Until now, our discussion has focused on current books—those published within the past few years and usually available free only through Amazon for a limited time.

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two things I've never been able to refuse—free food and free books. Of

Another hero was Tom Swift, in the books. What he stood for, the freedom, the scientific knowledge and being and engineer gave him the ability to invent solutions to problems. He's always been a hero to me. I buy old Tom Swift books now and read them to my own children.

All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what's cool.

You may borrow them, if you wish," so I could avoid letting him startle me. "I'd like that very much." "I should warn you, however, that I have several volumes devoted to curses for people who don't return books." "I'd like to borrow those, too.

I was convinced (still I am, in fact) that there's no such thing as a novel, astonishing or not, without a penis.

If you are in any way squeamish or genteel, skip 'Gillespie and I.' If you'd like to know a little more about the seamy side of the human condition, by all means, pick this one up.

What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky' by Lesley Nneka Arimah blew my mind.

My theory in the '90s was that I didn't want to take a Jane Austen book I loved and reduce it to a 90-minute movie. The Emma Thompson-Ang Lee 'Sense and Sensibility' was beautiful, but other ones, I didn't think justice was being done. It's not a slam dunk to adapt these books.

The society of dead authors has this advantage over that of the living: they never flatter us to our faces, nor slander us behind our backs, nor intrude upon our privacy, nor quit their shelves until we take them down.

I cannot go to sleep without reading.

I am positive I was not a neglected child. I remember reading 'The Jungle Book' and 'The Sleeping Beauty.'

I'm the weird person who completely loved and devoured 'Middlemarch' but who has not finished far shorter and more readable books due to distraction or the fact that by some miracle I am sleeping through the night.

There may well be writers who roll up their sleeves and say, 'I'm going to write a post-9/11 novel' but I wasn't one of those.

I once rented the Georgian town house that Jane Austen lived in down by the Holburne Museum - so I lived in Jane Austen's house, and slept in Jane Austen's bedroom. You can walk along these Georgian streets and it's like you're in a Jane Austen period drama.

I was reading some Raymond Carver. I really liked how he did that 'slice of life' thing. Because I'm not much of a reader I end up finding out about these things a long time after other people.

Mary Stewart will always be my goddess. I can pick up one of her early books - one I've read a dozen times - and still slide right into the story.

The earliest English attempts at rhyming probably included words whose agreement is so slight that it deserves the name of mere 'assonance' rather than that of actual rhyme.

It's odd to meet a rather elderly man who says, 'I've been reading you all my life.' It makes you feel a slight chill.

I like to say that I don't have the slightest doubt that Barack Obama read me in the early 80s. It's the kind of person he was!