Quotes About Literature

I'd known since girlhood that I wanted to be a book editor. By high school, I'd pore over the acknowledgments section of novels I loved, daydreaming that someday a brilliant talent might see me as the person who 'made her book possible' or 'enhanced every page with editorial wisdom and insight.' Could I be the Maxwell Perkins to some future Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe?

Every story, the moment it's written down, will be reread," she said. "And every rereading will be a reinterpretation. In that sense, there is not an original story and there is not an original message.

The reader is always right

A reader of mine is a deluxe reader, not because I'm so great but because in order to get to me you have to take a path through literature, not through some books bought out of curiosity at the bookstore. A reader of mine has to have read other things.

The son was in high school. He had a part-time job at a laundromat in a small disenchanting strip mall. He was reading Anna Karenina. He was three hundred– plus pages deep. Soap 'n' Suds was almost never busy. The boss was scarce. The son could read. A young woman arrived with her wash, got change, and asked what he was reading. Anna Karenina. Oh, she said, is that the one where she throws herself on the rails at the end. Asshole, he muttered.

But since printing came in no one wants illustrated works, they are happy with these cheap books with their ugly, square letters all squashed together.

Literature and art are never created for scholars but for a universal audience. If academics cannot see that audience, the cannot see art.

Literature has the power to change lives, minds, and hearts.

But literature is unique. To understand literature, you read it with your head, but you interpret it with your heart. The two are forced to work together-and, quite frankly, they often don't get along.

Child, unless you are opening a dictionary, you start at the book's opening page and you read the story through. If it's terribly dreadful, then just put it down and move on. What I will not tolerate is reading ahead. It's not fair to the reader or to the author. If they meant to have their books read backwards, they would surely have written them that way!

Literature is a cake with many toys baked inside--and even if you find them all, if you don't enjoy the path that leads you to them, it will be a hollow accomplishment.

Sang Ly, we are literature-our lives, our hopes, our desires, our despairs, our passions, our strengths, our weaknesses. Stories express our longing not only to make a difference today but to see what is possible for tomorrow. Literature has been called a handbook for the art of being human.

One of the first lessons that I hope you grasp is that woven into meaningful literature, so tightly that it can't be separated, is a telling lesson, even in stories as short as this one. Always? I ask. Always! she confirms. Good stories teach!

He wasn't Tolstoy but just plain old James Gooch. Commercial writer. Destined to be of the moment and not to stand the test of time. And the worst thing about it was that he'd never be able to pretend to be Tolstoy again.

I am speaking of University Education, which implies an extended range of reading, which has to deal with standard works of genius, or what are called the classics of a language: and I say, from the nature of the case, if Literature is to be made a study of human nature, you cannot have a Christian Literature. It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless Literature of a sinful man.

If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.

One glance at (a book) and you hear the voice of another person - perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millenia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time.

More recently, books, especially paperbacks, have been printed in massive and inexpensive editions. For the price of a modest meal you can ponder the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the origin of species, the interpretation of dreams, the nature of things. Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.

You know the opinion of Cervantes? He said that reading a translation is like examining the back of a piece of tapestry.

And reading itself is an amazing activity: You glance at a thin, flat object made from a tree...and the voice of the author begins to speak inside your head. (Hello!)

For the price of a modest meal you can ponder the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the origin of species, the interpretation of dreams, the nature of things. Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.

we completely decrypt it, how good could the translation be? You know the opinion of Cervantes? He said that reading a translation is like examining the back of a piece of tapestry.

Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

In a novel of ideas, the ideas have to work.