Quotes About Literature

The publishers and others should quit worrying about losing customers to TV. The guy who can sit through a trio of deodorant commercials to look at Flashgun Casey or swallow a flock of beer and loan-shark spiels in order to watch a couple of fourth-rate club fighters rub noses on the ropes is not losing any time from book reading.

When I split an infinitive, god damn it, I split it so it stays split.

The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called significant literature will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles.

You're smiling. But you must know yourself, since you are a literary person, that the work of fiction is always a form of recovery of the past, even if that past has to be falsified to seem real. The act of recalling the past in what we write doesn't mean knowing the way it really was, but rather becoming the master of memories as they burn in the perilous instant of creation.

Ray did not but could have said, *quote* Me, I read books [.....] How's about you? *closequote*

The classical author who writes his tragedy observing a certain number of known rules is freer than the poet who writes down whatever comes into his head and is slave to other rules of which he knows nothing.

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.

Buying books was a way anyone could acquire a work of art for very little.

Growing up, I read all three of Frederick Douglass' autobiographies by the time I was 12.

I don't read much about the Canadian Football League.

I've cancelled all my subscriptions to poetry magazines. I prefer to read the 'New Scientist.'

Shakespeare's always on my dance card if it can be.

When I was a kid and wanted to grow up to be a writer, I assumed I would be writing about animals and children because that's what I cared about and read about. But I never did.

I consider what I write to be literature. I choose the words carefully.

As a writer I care about America, and care about its carelessness.

I've been asked what differentiates war literature as a category, and I don't think there is anything.

Flannery O'Connor was a revelation for me. When I read her, I was very young, and I didn't understand what she was doing. I didn't see any of the Catholicism or any of the social stuff.

Flannery O'Connor was a revelation for me. When I read her, I was very young, and I didn't understand what she was doing. I didn't see the - any of the Catholicism or any of the social stuff.

Literature is love. I think it went like this: drawings in the cave, sounds in the cave, songs in the cave, songs about us. Later, stories about us.

When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfarthers of Blair and little Bush were scratching around in caves.

Shakespeare was completely fictionalising the people who were then the great celebrities of English.

I longed for literary celebrity even as I saw with my own eyes how little happiness it brought.

My first book, 'Running Loose', was censored back in 1983 or '84. Every book I've written since has been censored somewhere.

Between 1961 and 1982, 'The Catcher in the Rye' was the most censored book in high schools and libraries in the United States. But all the talk about banning it made me rush out to find it.