Quotes About Literature

I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books

A novel which does moral injury to a dozen imbeciles, and has bracing results upon a thousand intellects of normal vigor, can justify its existence; and probably a novel was never written by the purest-minded author for which there could not be found some moral invalid or other whom it was capable of harming. The Profitable Reading of Fiction 1888

The best fiction is truer than history

Mi sia concesso ripetere che un romanzo è un'impressione, non un'argomentazione.

Back at his chair he cannot remember what he was reading. He feels the books beside him to find the one that is warm.

Any rational society would either kill me or give me my books.

Thomas Harris

If I may paraphrase Hobbes 's well-known aphorism, I would say that 'books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.

If I read as many books as most men do, I would be as dull-witted as they are.

But when I think of how many there are to whose designs it will be advantageous that these principles should be false, when I see that those who maintain contrary doctrines are not corrected, even though they have been punished by a civil war, when I see that the best minds are nourished by the seditious doctrines of the ancient Greeks and Romans, I fear that this writing of mine will be numbered with Plato's Republic, More's Utopia, Bacon's New Atlantis, and similar amusements of the mind.

Easy reading is damned hard writing.

Without books, I would certainly die.

I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too.

A] lawyer without books would be like a workman without tools.

I cannot live without books: but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.

as we advance in life these things fall off one by one , and I suspect we are left with only Homer and Virgil , perhaps with only Homer alone.

I cannot live without books. Thomas Jefferson

I cannot live without my books -

I can't live without books

I cannot live qithout books~ Thomas Jefferson

I can not live without books

I cannot live without books. --Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

But re-reading Voss also demonstrates again that although White wasn't 'a nice man', and indeed was—perhaps rightly—scathingly dismissive of my and other Australian writers' work and origins unless they were his friends, he was a genius, and Voss one of the finest works of the modernist era and of the past century.

Modern literature is a north-east wind--a blight of the human soul. I take credit to myself for having helped to make it so. The way to produce fine fruit is to blight the flower. You call this a paradox. Marry, so be it.