Quotes About Literature

How many times have you opened a book, read the first few sentences and made a snap decision about whether to buy it? When it's your book that's coming under this casual-but-critical scrutiny, you want the reader to be instantly hooked. The way to accomplish this is to create compelling opening sentences.

My bookshelves chiefly function as a snapshot of what I was reading prior to the invention of the Kindle.

People who would never sneer at sci-fi and murder mysteries have no trouble damning the whole romance genre without reading one.

Close friends consider me a literary snob.

I feel that I have an impractical and deleterious snobbery about the relation of literature to the market. I thought, 'I've become the kind of crap you buy at airports!' It was exciting, but it was not a fantasy I'd ever had.

I'm not at all snobby about book prizes and how they pollute the world of literature. Just like with the Olympics, a little bit of competition gets people truly engrossed in the business of literature.

And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.

When I first became brave enough to tell people that I wrote poems, so many people would rave to me about Edna St. Vincent Millay's work. I was embarrassed not to have read her, and I think that put me off from reading her for a long time. So many of her poems are just impeccable.

I'm not someone who has a list of great books I would read if I only had the time. If I want to read a particular so-called classic, I go ahead and read it. If I had more time, I would certainly read more, but I'd read the way I always do - that is, I'd read whatever happened to interest me, not necessarily classics.

If they had said my writing wasn't good enough, fair enough, that's an opinion. But to say it's too complex is to insult the intelligence of the so-called young.

Something happened when the memoirs of so-called ordinary people, like myself, suddenly hit the bestseller list.

We can sum up the surrealist distinction between 'literature' and 'poetry' by saying where the former is artificial, fictive and elusive, the latter is natural, real, direct and spontaneous.

I had to go to literature to survive. It was through literature such as Black Spring that I came to a deeper understanding of my place and time and allowed me to come to where I am today and to achieve what I've achieved today.

Reading this dialogue did something good for me. It made me think very hard about this book and revise my thinking about it, as literature has done in my life before. When you associate your mind with greats, your mind improves, your mind goes to new places. As the Jewish Kabbalists said, it's the white between the letters, not the black ink you see, that is important. That's something very hard to comprehend unless you've thought about mysticism.

Thomas Macaulay's History of England

The greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar.

Il n'est pas de chagrin qu'un livre ne puisse consoler.

There is more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret things, and more books upon books than upon any other subject; we do nothing but comment upon one another. Every place swarms with commentaries; of authors there is great scarcity.

In general I ask for books that make use of learning, not those that build it up.

When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books.They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.

For I make others say what I cannot say so well,... I do not count my borrowings, but, weight them.... They are all, or very nearly all, from such famous and ancient names that they seem to identify themselves enough without me.

To hear men talk of metonomies, metaphors, and allegories, and other grammar words, would not one think they signified some rare and exotic form of speaking? And yet they are phrases that come near to the babble of my chambermaid. And

Of course I know that the twins are only words on a page, and I'm certainly not the sort of writer who talks to his characters or harbours any illusions about the creative process. But at the same time, I think it's juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren't real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative.

Reading, by its very nature, is an admission of defeat, a ritual of self-humiliation: it shows that you believe other lives are more interesting than yours