Quotes About Literature

To read is to strike a blow for culture

All of this made me feel better about myself, and I was grateful to the books for teaching me-without my even having to read them- that there were people in the world more desperate, more self-absorbed, more boring than I was. - about memoirs

This is a book in which we will dance with language, not a book in which we will trudge toward remedial correctness.

Strunk and White do a great job of reminding us to avoid needless words, but they don't begin to consider all of the ways in which more words might actually be needed. My goal will be to explain why, in many cases, we need to add words to improve our writing, as Faulkner so frequently does, rather than trying to pare our writing down to some kind of telegraphic minimum, as is frequently the case with Hemingway.

I pictured a low timber house with a shingled roof, caulked against storms, with blazing log fires inside and the walls lined with all the best books, somewhere to live when the rest of the world blew up.

If you always read books, you'll always be happy.

Magical Realist writer write the ordinary as miraculous and the miraculous as ordinary.

How can I write a book? you might say. I've got nothing to say. Don't let that stop you. Very few writers have anything to say. The trick is to see how long you can conceal that from the reader. The most successful writers are ones who've been able to get away with it for the greatest number of pages and years.

Bruce Jay Friedman

what distinguishes pulp fiction from great literature is how emphatically the work challenges us to interpret it.

What I liked most was that George had class, the way he walked and talked, reading Shakespeare and all those books. He knew about van Gogh and Picasso, he gave me a book about Dali. And just the way he conducted himself, you could see it. He was very elegant in his manners.

The rock death cult is well loved and chronicled in literature and music, but in practice, there ain't much in it for the singer and his song, except a good life unlived, lovers and children left behind, and a six-foot-deep hole in the ground. The exit in a blaze of glory is bullshit.

SCHISMATRIX is a creeping sea-urchin of a book—spikey and odd. It isn't very elegant, and it lacks bilateral symmetry, but pieces of it break off inside people and stick with them for years.

For ordinary books are like meteors. Each of them has only one moment, a moment when it soars screaming like the phoenix, all its pages aflame. For that single moment we love them ever after, although they soon turn to ashes. With bitter resignation we sometimes wander late at night through the extinct pages that tell their stone dead messages like wooden rosary beads.

Das Unwirkliche ist das, was man untereinander nicht teilen kann. Was auch immer aus dieser Gemeinsamkeit herausfällt, das fällt aus dem Kreis menschlicher Angelegenheiten, geht über die Grenzen des menschlichen Theaters, über die Grenzen der Literatur hinaus.

documents—a luxury that earlier lexicographers never enjoyed.

Settling in New York, de Zavala spent the next two years authoring a pair of well-received books, including a U.S. travelogue, Journey to the United States of North America, that's sometimes compared to Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

A la mierda! ¡El que quiera leer a Rimbaud que aprenda francés!

been forgotten, but his longest novel, Moby-Dick — largely considered a failure during his lifetime, and responsible for Melville's drop in popularity — was rediscovered in the 20th century as a literary masterpiece. Source: Wikipedia

Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed. Whilst

The whale has no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you will say.

Queequeg, nous passerons sous silence sa manière

Aucun volume gros et durable ne pourra jamais être écrit sur la puce ; bien que beaucoup s'y soient essayés

He loved books, never going to sea without a newly replenished library, compact but of the best.