Quotes About Literature

There are certain books that should be taken away from young writers; that should be prised out of their clutching fingers and locked away until they are all grown up and ready to read them without being smitten.

I would love to see young writers come out of college and know there is a possibility to be a novelist.

As a middle-aged woman who has had some luck as a writer, I'd like this profession of author to remain a possibility for young writers in the future - and not become an arena solely for the hobbyist or the well-heeled.

What I find, particularly with young writers and readers, is that they don't want complicated feelings.

Nabokov, who I loved more than any other writer when I was young, had such contempt for dialogue. When I was younger, I never wrote a word of dialogue because of him. I thought it was a childish part of a novel.

I read 'Carrie' when I was younger and that's one of my favourite books.

The test of an author is not to be found merely in the number of his phrases that pass current in the corner of newspapers... but in the number of passages that have really taken root in younger minds.

When I was younger, I inhaled books, and reading has always been my one true love.

'The Glass Menagerie' by Tennessee Williams is a great play. I had to read it for school when I was younger, but I started writing scripts after that. That's what got me into writing.

Back in my younger years, I read an average of a book a day. That was when I was going to school full time and working a job after school 30 hours or more a week.

Rian Malan was one of the first younger writers to perceive and write about a darkness in the South African psyche that goes deeper than mere politics. To some extent, that's my territory, too.

When I was younger, I read all the great food memoirs, by M.F.K. Fisher and Laurie Colwin and Julia Child and Nicolas Freeling and Ruth Reichl, and felt flooded with a sense of comfort and safety.

I don't know if younger poets read a lot of, you know, the poets - the established poets. There was a lot of pretty boring stuff to sort of put up with and to add to, to make something vital from.

I have a brother younger than me. My mother was a librarian, so from her, I got the taste to read.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

I went through a whole phase when I was younger of being obsessed with Tolstoy and Kafka and Camus, all those really, beautiful, dark depressing books.

The younger generation is surrounded by the Internet, apps, and video games. But somehow, my books make them read.

I've been criticised for writing in too complex a manner for younger people.

To the best of my knowledge, my youngest reader is 10 and the oldest is 95.

Roald Dahl pioneered a new kind of literature for youngsters, one that dispensed with cant and solemnity, favoring anarchy and joy over duty and humbuggery while acknowledging that oftentimes no good deed goes unpunished. But ultimately, it was his sheer joie de vivre that carried the day.

We can make his work reach youngsters by organising literary events and competitions in schools and colleges. We can also use mainstream media to spread Kaloji's work among the public. Also it's important to honour litterateurs when they are alive; sadly Kaloji never got his due in his lifetime.

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

The addictive pleasure of abandoning yourself to a book, of losing consciousness of your worries, your body, and your surroundings, to become a ghost haunting other worlds has influenced me in many ways.

As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read the book.