Quotes About Literature

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?

I do not know any reading more easy, more fascinating, more delightful than a catalogue.

Books should be tried by a judge and jury as though they were crimes.

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

A book is the only immortality.

A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

In Canada we have enough to do keeping up with two spoken languages ... so we just go right ahead and use English for literature, Scotch for sermons, and American for conversation.

The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.

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.

If there had been a censorship of the press in Rome we should have had today neither Horace nor Juvenal, nor the philosophical writings of Cicero.

Every burned book enlightens the world.

Critics are the men who have failed in literature and art.

Book reviewers are little old ladies of both sexes.

Henry James chews more than he bites off.

The critic is an overgoer with pen-envy.

A critic at best is a waiter at the great table of literature.

Each person has a literature inside them. But when people lose language, when they have to experiment with putting their thoughts together on the spot-that's what I love most. That's where character lives.

For a country to have a great writer is to have another government.

For me it is sufficient to have a corner by my hearth, a book and a friend, and a nap undisturbed by creditors or grief.

When you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for this reason that I don't mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met and spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to feel any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel I ought to - like the Labour M.P.s who get patted on the back by dukes and are lost forever more.

The total absence of humour from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

Charles Dickens' creation of Mr. Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human race - I say it in all seriousness - than Cardinal Newman's Lead Kindly Light Amid the Encircling Gloom. Newman only cried out for light in the gloom of a sad world. Dickens gave it.