Quotes About Literature

A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

In English, we were still on the Introduction to Poetry Unit, and I'm not lying, if I ever meet Percy Bysshe Shelley walking down the streets of Marysville, I'm going to punch him right in the face.

There are good reasons to learn how to read. Poetry isn't one of them... Why can't poets just say what they want to say and then shut up?

An hour spent in any bookstore will also tune you in to what the world is thinking (and writing about), what is hot, what is popular, what the trends are. Just browsing, without even buying anything, is an education in itself.

I have three kids who like Harry Potter so I was sort of aware of it. You can't really move from it: it's on buses, in stores, it's everywhere. One of my kids has read the books the other two are too small but they like the movies.

I think movies do play a valuable role in turning people on to the act of reading. I think that phenomenon just creates readers. At first they're going to love 'Harry Potter ' or they may love 'The Hunger Games ' but after that, they're going to love the act of reading and wonder, 'What else can I read?'

I wonder if "an" ever occurs before "haughty" except in a quotation, or whether you can make anything sound like a quotation by adding a word like "goeth"?

People who rarely read long books, or even short stories, still appreciate the greatest examples of the shortest literary genres. I have long been fascinated by these short genres. They seem to lie just where my heart is, somewhere between literature and philosophy.

Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.

It appears these days I don't have much of a life because my nose is often stuck in a book. But I discovered that reading builds a life inside the mind.

I was the first Chicano to write in complete sentences.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful...

In the art of literature there are two contending parties. Those who aim to tell stories that are more or less well thought out, and those who aim at beautiful language, beauty of form. This contest may last a very long time; each side has a fifty-fifty chance. Only the poet can rightfully demand that verse be beautiful and nothing but.

Who in the hell was Halliday? Just a guy from out of town who'd written a few bad mystery novels. Really a has-been. Still trying to ride along on the hard-boiled stuff that had gone out of favor with the old Black Mask.

A writer should say to himself, not, How can I get more money?, but How can I reach more readers (without lowering standards)?

I deliberately borrow from Shakespeare; the most precious objects on Earth are not gems or jewels, but ink marks on paper. No single human brain could conceive of Hamlet, Principia Mathematica or Codex Leicester; they were created by and belong to the entire human race, and the library of wonders continues to grow.

They could read it on each other, their faces wrinkled pages. Words hiding in the folds of their clothes. She was made of letters then, as all of us are now.

not a single scrap of actual historical or archeological evidence for this theorizing, it also reeks of modern imperialism by projecting stupidity onto the writers of some of the most intelligent and poetic literature in history. Such arrogance is easily dismissed when one studies the ancient cultural context of divine names as expressing character traits related to specific situations.

Sometimes a piece of literature is intended to be factual or historical, sometimes poetic or figurative, oftentimes both. So it is the literary context that determines how a scripture should be understood, not our expectations that we bring to the text. Since the Bible is literature with different genres and styles of writing, we should be literary in our interpretation, not literal.

One of the sad little secrets of the writing life is that it's become like the movie business, where a movie has to "open big"; if a book hasn't caught anybody's interest in the first two weeks of its life, it's not going to.

But his life consisted, for the most part, of writing and reading. He wrote during the day, read at night, went to bed early, and did the same thing the next day.

I like the pages to turn. I like the bookness of the book.

She walked to the rear door and took out a bobby pin from her pocket. Hugo watched as she fiddled with the pin inside the lock until it clicked and the door opened. "How did you learn to do that?" asked Hugo. "Books," answered Isabelle.

How did you learn to do that?" asked Hugo. "Books," answered Isabelle.