Quotes About Literature

You can't see why anyone wouldn't want to wallow in the sheer beauty of language .

You ever try holding, say, even a single chapter of a novel in your head? Consciously? All at once?

Hell, Neil Gaiman took a classic that nine-year-old Peter Watts devoured without any trouble at all—Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book—and dumbed it down to an (admittedly award-winning) story about ghosts and vampires, aimed at an audience who might find a story about sapient wolves and tigers too challenging. It may only be a matter of time before Nineteen Eighty Four is reissued using only words from the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary.

Neither exhortations to virtue nor the argument of approaching death should divert us from literature; for in a good mind it excites the love of virtue, and dissipates, or at least diminishes, the fear of death.

I am possessed by one insatiable passion , which I cannot restrain nor would I if I could ... I cannot get enough books .

Your Homer is here with me; mute or rather in fact deaf am I, in front of him. But I am happy to gaze upon him and often hug him and, sighing, say, 'Great man, how I would love to hear you!

Ah efendim, dedi, bizi bizden daha iyi biliyorlar; Mesnevi'yi de, Rubiyat'? da, Gazali'yi de, Farabi'yi de bizden daha çok okuyorlar; bizden daha çok takdir ediyorlar; bizim bizden daha büyük dü?man?m?z yoktur efendim, yoktur.

Novels are nice,' my friend said. 'They stop.' He waggled his fingers to make quotation marks in the air. 'They say, 'The End.' Very nice. A marvelous invention. Here we have stories, but never 'The End.

I'm reading Edmund White. It's so nice. All about Jack Holmes and his great big penis. It's like he's got a little pet in the house that he needs to take for walks sometimes, in the park. I really like it.

I love men, I love books, I can't get enough of them.

William Leonard Courtney (then sixty-one-year-old theatre and literary editor of the Daily Telegraph, he had been an Oxford professor of philosophy until forced to resign when his homosexuality became public knowledge)

You mean old books?" "Stories written before space travel but about space travel." "How could there have been stories about space travel before --" "The writers," Pris said, "made it up.

You read much, Bernie?' 'More and more,' I admitted. 'And for me it's like the French Foreign Legion. I do it to forget. Myself, I think.

Sexual intercourse beganIn nineteen sixty-three(Which was rather late for me)—Between the end of the Chatterley banAnd the Beatles' first LP.

There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!

I'd like to think...that people in pubs would talk about my poems

Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me) between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP.

books are a load of crap

There is bad in all good authors

I really am going to meet Forster: I thought I shouldn't, but apparently the old boy E.M.F. is saying with remembered my name & I am bid to John Hewitt's at 8 tomorrow. Shall I ask him if he's a homo? It's the only thing I really want to know about him, you see. I don't even care why he packed up writing.

A very crude difference between novels and poetry is that novels are about other people and poetry is about yourself.

As you know, Joyce was a writer who asked his reader to give him a lifetime," he said. "I am that reader, and I can tell you it was a wasted life.

Children's books can break [the] silence. Reading the un-bowdlerized classics of children's literature can help young people understand that racism is not anomalous. It is embedded in the culture, and defended by cultural gatekeepers.

We don't need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.