Quotes About Literature

I wanted to be Emma Goldman. I wanted to digest Doris Lessing's Golden Notebooks like biscuits. I felt like Harriet the Spy, looking for a dumbwaiter to hide in, scribbling down all I witnessed.

Sometimes I think books are the only friends worth having.

The truth is, we don't have an easy language for emotional life. That's why we have writers.

It often requires more courage to read some books than it does to fight a battle.

You come up and read books?" asked Gregor. "Read them, eat them, whatever mood strikes me,

And that was the voice of Peeta

The effort of focusing all serious attention on a small number of books and authors is to diminish awareness of the richness and variety of children's literature. It becomes impossible to grasp the development of children's literature, or the context in which individual books were written. Ultimately, the study of children's literature is the poorer for ignoring so much fine material. And children are the poorer too, given fewer opportunities to hear of books that might enrich their lives.

Only those books which consistently produce high profits are allowed to survive, and a number of "good books" have slipped quietly out of print. It is less likely than it used to be for a scholar or a teacher or a librarian - or a child - simply to come in contact with a book which is neither brand new nor extremely popular.

I read novels to indulge in a concentrated and directed inner activity that parallels -- and thereby tunes up, accentuates -- my own inner life.

If literature is to survive, to gain back some of the power it has ceded to terrorists and newsmakers of all descriptions, it must become dangerous.

It's hard to imagine what the Bronte sisters' lives would've been like had they been men. Different things would've been expected of them, and maybe they wouldn't have ended up writing because they would've been packed off to do something else.

Most people who write and publish poetry teach or do something else.

I'm not a good crime writer. I'm not good with plots... so I have to do something else.

When I was fifteen, my father gave me a first edition copy of Ray Bradbury's magnificent work, 'The Martian Chronicles.' I had read other science fiction by noted authors, but this book was something else altogether.

It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised.

There were books all over the house, and I was always told that I could write and that it was something good to do. So when I finally did it, it wasn't so strange or bizarre.

We should ensure to teach the next generation something good. We have such rich literature and history. Why can't we make better stories?

I didn't read The Haunting of Hill House until sometime early in the 1990's.

My books are shelved in different places, depending on the bookstore. Sometimes they can be found in the Mystery section, sometimes in the Humor department, and occasionally even in the Literature aisle, which is somewhat astounding.

It's somewhat disquieting that the same parents and educators who are horrified by the notion of child soldiers have bestowed upon 'The Hunger Games' a double mantle of critical praise and global bestsellerdom.

I guess I find the boundaries between poetry and prose to be somewhat permeable.

I am truly bored with 99 per cent of conventional novels. I do think it's a somewhat desiccated form.

My idea of going to hell is going somewhere where there are no books.

To read a character I'm not sympathizing with is generally quite a good, attractive proposition because I've got somewhere to go, I've got work to do, to try to understand why they behave like they behave, to relate entirely and understand them and to be completely emotionally connected. That is much more fun 99 percent of the time.