Quotes About Literature

I remember when I was working on All Alone in the Universe, and Robin Roy was my editor. When I first sent it to her, she said kids this age don't want pictures in their books.

I like Jo Nesbo and Hakan Nesser. There are so many good books in the world. I don't want to spend time reading bad crime novels.

Literature is capable of being a subject that people want to catch up on or discuss, whether at a coffee shop or a watercooler. It can become an intrinsic part of their dialogue.

Sanity -- that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.

I like a great degree of compression. I like to mix lateral steps with forward ones. I don't want the prose ever to feel simply functional - at least not for any stretch.

This is why it is good to remember: if you want to get high, don't drink whiskey; read Shakespeare, Tennyson, Keats, Neruda, Hopkins, Millay, Whitman, aloud and let your body sing.

I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

I wanted to see who this Yeats person was, and I said to my mother, 'I want a book by this person.' And she bought it for me, and a lot of it was over my head, but I had it.

The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.

More than anything I am a novelist. But for me, an author's job is not only to create linguistically accomplished works. As an author I also want to stimulate discussion.

I am proud to be a Turk, and to write in Turkish about Turkey - and to have been translated into about 40 languages. But I don't want to politicize things by dramatizing them.

I don't like to make strong statements. I want to write strong novels … I keep my deep radical things for my novels.

I've read Flowers in the Attic and The Other Side of Midnight and Go Ask Alice and I don't want to read any more books where the girl dies in the end.

Deirdre Maddon has an extraordinary, almost celestial way of telling a story. There are so many great writers now - although I also want to go back and read all of Dickens again.

Anybody who is afraid of reading a page of text is not the reader that I want.

Warfare is the father of all good things, it is also the father of good prose!

The old fun thing is when somebody typed up the first chapter of War and Peace. And then made a precis of the rest of it and sent it out and only one publisher recognized it.

I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.

Vermeer's woman reading a letter is as full of latent or subliminal kitsch as Tolstoy's War and Peace.

I can't envision an honest war novel that left war in a positive light.

I wished I could take every course in the curriculum and read every book in the library. Sometimes after I finished a particularly good book, I had the urge to get the library card, find out who else read the book, and track them down to talk about it.

His writer's words poured over her like poetry, and she couldn't find a single wisecrack to put up between them.

Daphne Du Maurier and Anya Seton, all of Mary Stewart's early books, along with Victoria Holt, Phyllis Whitney

When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead.