Quotes About Literature

English is so past,' she said. 'Sure, we need people who can write about what we do, but they don't have to be English graduates. Theology graduates who don't believe any of it – that would be useful.

I've seen enough films. I don't want to see any more. I get far less out of seeing films than I do out of reading books. So I've got about a billion books to get through before I see another film.

The fox came to pay the birch tree a vist, bringing with him a book of poetry. He was wearing a dark blue suit fresh from the tailor's, and his light brown leather shoes squeaked slightly as he walked.

To read Shakespeare is to feel encompassed -- the plays contain practically every word I know, practically every character type I have ever met, and practically every idea I have ever had.

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations — such is a pleasure beyond compare.

well knew Augustus' practice of recasting ancient religions to include his coming in their traditional prophetic literature. Egomania coupled with absolute power could indeed change the world — but not necessarily for the better. Why doesn't he just write the cursed thing himself? Virgil fumed — silently.

As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.

I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.

The text contains no literary criticism. I wanted to describe books, not to be clever at their expense.

I've had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.

Mr. Mailer's work probably gave me hope that there was a way to be intelligent without being an intellectual.

Buy books, then, that you have read with profit and pleasure and hope to read and reread. Buy books that you may underscore passages and write upon the margins, thus assuring yourself that the book is your own. Keep the books that mean the most to you close at hand, one or two, if possible, on a table at your bedside. Do not hide away your favorite books or keep them locked in enclosed shelves. Do not keep them under glass.

If you open a book and find that the writer is trying to impress you with his knowledge of long, unusual words or by his use of foreign phrases, close the book quickly with no sense of loss or of deficiency or of having missed anything; for the author has not learned how to write and perhaps never will, and there is no need for you to offer yourself as a sounding board for his incompetence.

No book, however good, should ever be read as a task. If you do so read a book, it is very likely that you will not only get nothing out of it but that you will have toward the book and its author a repugnance that is unwarranted.

The way I see it is, I am a boon to the English language.

We have also grown up with a body of literature created by women of color in the last thirty years-- Alice Walker's words about womanism, Gloria Anzaldua's theories about living in the borderlands and Audre Lorder's writing about silences and survival.

The words that bore the deathless verse of Homer from bard to a group of fascinated hearers, and with whose fading sounds the poems passed beyond recall, are fixed on the printed page in a hundred tongues. They carry to a million eyes what once could reach but a hundred ears.

My young friend, why to poetry aspire? Don't court the muses, but adopt a trade, For literature is sadly underpaid.

Literature is a toy for adults; my books are toys for adults who have read Lautréamont.

In barbaric lands like the Americas, writers produced their best work before learning the craft, and nine times out of ten, their book was the strongest, as well as being, in general, the only one they wrote.

Readers seek out fellow readers as much as they seek out books, though fellow readers are, alas, harder to find. So we hold on to them for life.

After thirty years working as a commercial fiction translator, I've reached to the conclussion that, on average, the more pages a book has, the less literature there is in it.

To be amused by what you read--that is the great spring of happy quotations.

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.