Quotes About Literature

I'll tell you what I think. I think you need to stay indoors reading more books!

I held it close to my face and smelled the ink. I have always loved the smell of ink in a new book.

I have always had this sense of books as lined up and waiting, patiently waiting, for people to find them;

Rabbinic literature can be studied in two different ways, in two directions, one might say. It can be studied quantitatively or qualitatively - or, as my father once put it, horizontally or vertically. The former involves covering as much material as possible, without attempting to wrest it from it all its implications and intricacies; the latter involves confining oneself to one single area until it is exhaustively covered, and then going on to new material.

And I have been fortunate to escape what has been called "that form of snobbery which can accept the Literature of Entertainment in the Past, but only the Literature of Enlightenment in the Present.

I am self-educated from genre books.

I've got libraries in my blood.

Well, they got married. No one pulled a Jane Eyre...

I kicked off my sandals, put my ice-tinkling glass on the small table by my current book.

Jack always had said you knew a person by the books they read . . . or didn't read.

In books, the hero was gone after the big blowup. He didn't stick around in the vicinity doing mysterious shit, sending messages to the heroine by a third party. He hauled his ass into oblivion. And that was the way things should be, as far as I was concerned. Life should imitate romance literature far more often.

Any place books are massed together makes me feel at home.

I had never been able to fathom what people did with their free moments, if they didn't read.

He didn't stick around in the vicinity doing mysterious shit, sending messages to the heroine by a third party. He hauled his ass into oblivion. And that was the way things should be, as far as I was concerned. Life should imitate romance literature far more often.

It's not that a literature for children of color doesn't exist; it's that so much of the extant literature is lacking in the essential quality that makes literature for children so extraordinary a form: imagination.

China lacks good science fiction, but not mediocre science fiction. Even so, the gap between Chinese and American sci-fi is still very large and it is most apparent in quality of the works.

I don't believe in kicking away ladders. By that, I mean the ladders by which I ascended as a young writer, small magazines that didn't pay anything, and that sort of thing.

A great performance like Lady Macbeth may be forgotten. Writing endures.

Queerness isn't just Lady Gaga and overpriced drinks and fauxhawks. It's James Baldwin and Bea Arthur and Gertrude Stein and Gore Vidal.

Walt Whitman, he who laid end to end words never seen in each other's company before outside of a dictionary.

'Cemetery Lake' was an interesting book to write.

I have introduced my daughter to the literary classics and landmark Bengali films. I want her to be well-versed in English but not at the cost of Bengali.

When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands.

Meeting authors is kind of the death of the characters. That is always heartbreaking.