Quotes About Literature

These were choice documents to me... They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance.

A writer can get into a vast deal of trouble through misquotation. If you ever want to receive lots of mail, I recommend you get a Shakespeare quote wrong in a magazine or newspaper.

Being published in Arabic is a strong and consistent wish I have. I live in the Middle East and want to be in some sort of an unpragmatic dialogue with my neighbors.

One of the great defects of English books printed in the last century is the want of an index.

With fiction, it could be about anything. It just has to be good writing, like Maria Semple's "Where'd You Go, Bernadette," which I read recently. I want to forget I have a book in my hand.

My whole thing is that I want to explore why you read books, what's the purpose of reading, and maybe that it's not that cool to hate something just because it's popular.

Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Sometimes I just want to write a really intense love scene. But I can't do that in my books for teens, or parents will complain - believe me, I've tried.

What I like least is dealing with publishers who simply don't want collaborations regardless of their merit.

I don't write books for people to be friends with the characters. If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.

Every time I finish a book, it's my favorite. I have a lot of favorites. I did just finish Jane Eyre and it was fabulous. I didn't want it to end.

I'm the only kid in the world who doesn't want an eighth Harry Potter book.

Sometimes I want to have a mental book burning that would scour my mind clean of all the filthy visions literature has conjured there. But how to do without 'The Illiad?' How to do without 'Macbeth?

This is not about money or anything other than the pleasure of reading for people who want to read it.

Agents and publishers only want one thing - good writing.

Wealth is walking into any bookshop and buying any book you want without looking at the price tag.

The single biggest reason I got my stories taken in various literary magazines - and I want to stress this - is because I refused to give up. Period.

My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books.

We seem to live a culture that doesn't want blemishes. The vision of most beautiful models... airbrushed in order to be seen as perfect, infects our notion of how literature should be written.

I write contemporary fiction, and that is what my readers want to read.

I don't really read as much as I used to. A lot of what I was looking for as an escape I find in writing. And the other thing is that I don't want to get into someone else's language when I'm working

Everyone wants to be open and inclusive, but nobody wants to pay for it. It's the biggest roadblock to translating living writers, especially poets.

I don't read memoirs. But if you write a memoir, I would think you'd want people to know, "O.K., look, I've taken some liberties here." It's just a matter of being open with your readers.

A bad author can take the most moral issue and make you want to just never, ever think about that moral issue.