Quotes About Literature

But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy.

Few writers push the reader away with the coolness, dignity, and faint melancholy of Fleur Jaeggy.

'Something Borrowed' was initially titled 'Rolling the Dice,' but my editor said it sounded like a men's gambling memoir.

I think one can be more honest in fiction than in a memoir.

I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel.

Memoirs are a well-known form of fiction.

'Undertones of War' by Edmund Blunden seems to get less attention than the memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, but it is a great book.

Listen, in England people are already writing their memoirs at the age of 23.

The Dumas memoirs - which I also discovered when I was a kid - had a big impact on me.

Too many memoirs focus on childhoods and it's a bit turgid.

I do gravitate toward 19th century writers, and I never mind being compared with some of the most memorable writers from that era. I mean, George Eliot is my absolute heroine.

Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand.

I think all writing is done through memory.

Children's literature is one of my joys, and it's also my mental comfort food.

Reading Stephen King's book, On Writing, was like being cornered and forced to have a long, drawn out mental enema.

I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality.

There will always be books as long as I am mentally capable of it.

I had grown up as a fan of Studs Terkel. In Chicago he sort of looms large and is mentioned often.

I have always had someone in my life that I consider my reading mentor because I come from a family where reading was not emphasized or even approved of.

I think the Merchant Ivory brand really means literate dialogue. I think it starts with that. When people say something, you know it has some sort of ripples to it.

Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?

It's hard to judge literary merit.

There's no literary merit in my books.

Writers of color are given certain messages - explicit or implicit - about what they're allowed to write about or what will be successful if they write about it. And white writers are given another set of implicit and, sometimes, explicit messages.