Quotes About Literature

I grew up with Mark Twain, and we had the complete Hemingway at home, of course in German translation.

I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.

Madeleine L'Engle's 'A Wrinkle in Time' has been targeted by censors for promoting New Ageism, and Mark Twain's 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' for promoting racism. Gee, where does that leave the kids?

Right from the start, I loved the works of Mark Twain. Every time I read about Tom Sawyer, I'd go out and do something low-level naughty, just like him.

Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and so many others were my dearest friends and greatest teachers.

Students don't know who Mark Twain was because he wasn't on the test.

Mark Twain created a new type of literature and not a lot of people can say that. Not a lot of people can say they're absolutely original and completely self-made.

Going into the past, I've always thought Mark Twain would be cool to hang out with for a little bit.

Books are anchored. You return to books. You don't return to a tweet.

I'm having a lot of fun on Twitter, tweeting about books.

I'm very comfortable with tweeting, I have a very active author Facebook page, I Skype book clubs all over the world.

As we continue to become a society of tweets, shorter and shorter messages, there's great value in the contemplation and reflection that comes from reading a long body of work.

Hemingway was really early. I probably started reading him when I was just eleven or twelve. There was just something magnetic to me in the arrangement of those sentences. Because they were so simple - or rather they appeared to be so simple, but they weren't.

Probably the most formative experience was reading the 'Foundation' trilogy when I was about twelve years old. That wasn't the first science fiction I had ever read, but it's something that stands out in my memory as having had a big impact on me.

I'm constantly snatching my books out of the hands of precocious ten-year-olds who are simply too young to read them, despite parents insisting that dear Octavia has a reading age of 28. I remember trying to read 'In Cold Blood' at the age of twelve, and realising that just because you can read book doesn't mean you should.

In 2008, when I wrote Book 1 and Book 2, the head of the publishing house suggested twelve books - one each month. For practical reasons, that didn't work out.

I first read 'Madame Bovary' in my teens or early twenties.

I was unnerved to learn in my twenties that the poems of Emily Dickinson that I had memorized as a girl were not the poems as she had written them.

I had the idea in my twenties that a writer could immediately become the late Henry James. Henry James himself had to mature. Even Saul Bellow did.

I must confess that in my teens and twenties, I loved 'Mansfield Park' rather in spite of Fanny than because of her. Like Fanny's rich, sophisticated cousins, I didn't really get her.

My twenties were entirely taken up with literature. Entirely.

Philip Roth has been a huge influence on me. The early books I read in my teens and twenties.

Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.

In ages past, there was less of a dichotomy between good literature and fun reads. In the twentieth century, I think, it split apart, so that you had serious fiction and genre fiction.