Quotes About Literature

you're stuck, reading helps: "The Beauties" by Anton Chekhov, "The Doll's House" by Katherine Mansfield, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" by J. D. Salinger, "Brownies" or "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" both by ZZ Packer, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" by Amy Hempel, "Fat" by Raymond Carver, "Indian Camp" by Ernest Hemingway. We should

Maybe an old favorite like Old School by Tobias Wolff, though his time would certainly be better spent on something new.

Aveva trascorso parecchie ore con quell'uomo, negli ultimi sei anni. Avevano discusso sempre e solo di libri, ma cosa, in questa vita, è più personale dei libri?

In reading Twain, I often suspect he is having more fun than I am.)

I can promise you books and conversation and all my heart.

A place ain't a place without a bookstore

I suspect it may be like the difference between a drinker and an alcoholic; the one merely reads books, the other needs books to make it through the day.

If I couldn't sleep, I could read.

I never met a word I didn't love

Whatever an author puts between the two covers of his book is public property; whatever of himself he does not put there is his private property, as much as if he had never written a word.

The studied spontaneity of Horace.

But you shall not escape my iambics.

To whom am I to present my pretty new book, freshly smoothed off with dry pumice stone? To you, Cornelius: for you used to think that my trifles were worth something, long ago.

What an eloquent manikin!

Prose is walking; poetry is flying

Once literature is contrived as the hymn of the nation, the flag of the race, the mouthpiece of a political party or the voice of a class or a group it can be employed as a mighty and all-engulfing tool of propaganda. However, such literature loses what is inherent in literature, ceases to be literature, and becomes a substitute for power and profit.

Reading this chapter is optional but as you've read it you've read it.

Yours is much worse than Eastern! You've slapped together travel notes, moralistic ramblings, feelings, notes, jottings, untheoretical discussions, unfable-like fables, copied out some folk songs, added some legend-like nonsense of your own invention, and are calling it fiction!

Since it was announced that I had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Chinese Foreign Ministry has condemned my works and criticized them harshly. All of my works are now banned from getting into China or being published in China. What author would want to return to a country that banned his or her books?

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

Reading this chapter is optional but as you've read it you've read it.

When I was learning the anthologist's trade many years ago, sitting at the knees—metaphorically speaking, at least—of veteran anthologists like Damon Knight and Robert Silverberg, I was taught that you should always save your strongest and best story for last.

Obviously it was meant to tell us nothing, which is exactly the opposite function of a book.

It's funny that I got to do 'On the Road' because the thing that had the biggest impact on me growing up was reading books. I was very inspired by the book and this spirit of Dean Moriarty and how envious we all are of somebody who can be that carefree.