Quotes About Literature

A reviewer's lot is not always an easy one. I can remember flogging myself to finish Harold Brodkey's 'The Runaway Soul' despite the novel's consummate, unmitigated tedium.

In France, for instance, one magazine writer was convinced that On The Road had been a huge influence on Lost Souls and was crushed to learn that I hadn't read the one until after I'd written the other.

We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.

I read a lot of W.E.B. Du Bois, who wrote 'The Souls of Black Folk.'

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I'm someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

I don't really know what an adverb is. A dangling participle? That sounds really rude. I don't know what character is, really. Plot seems vaguely juvenile to me. It's all about language, it's all about how you apply it to the page.

I consider myself lucky that Sonu Nigam, Bikram Ghosh and Taufiq Quereshi came forward to create an original soundtrack to promote my book, something that hasn't been tried here before!

A page of my journal is like a cake of portable soup. A little may be diffused into a considerable portion.

I think it is important for children to read different things to find out about their emotions and other people's emotions. It is an enormous source of education and culture.

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.

One has a sort of spiritual obligation to go back to the source material of the literature, to make contact with one of the seminal plays of the modern theater.

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.

My main source of reading is scripts, which doesn't leave a whole lot of room for books.

What I see in the book is an exquisite form of technology: one that doesn't require a power source and can be passed from hand to hand and lasts a lot longer than an electronic reader.

Books can be a source of solace, but I see them mainly as a source of pleasure, personal as well as esthetic.

I should confess that I'm woefully under-read in South African fiction.

Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.

I haven't scoured Dixie out of my voice. But I don't think that the books that I have written... have really in any way been Southern in character.

At first I read mostly books by Southern authors - black and white - because almost all the people I knew were born and raised in the South, starting with my mother. I remember I got a lot of Erskine Caldwell.

I think often people don't realize the great diversity of Southern writing because in their minds, if you're not from the South, it can seem regional and small, and of course that's not the case at all when you start to read the work.

I like the South: Southern literature and that relationship between grotesqueness and living below the Mason-Dixon line. But I also understand that people view it as a limitation - as an actor and as a person - perceptions that are really wrong: that you are ignorant and possibly illiterate, or that it's cute.

I have always identified with Joan Didion's depiction of Los Angeles and Southern California, ever since reading 'Play It As It Lays,' 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' and 'The White Album.'

I'm a very big Faulkner fan 'cause I'm a Southerner.