Quotes About Literature

I've often thought that the unit of measure that best suits prose is the human breath

La véritable fonction de la littérature est de nous maintenir en vie dans un monde brutal. [Interview de Charles Dantzig par Josyane Savigneau à l'occasion de la publication de Pourquoi lire ?, 15 oct. 2010, journal Le Monde]

I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me

It is uphill work writing books

In art and literature we require not only an expression of the facts in nature and in human life, but of feeling, thought, emotion. There must be an appeal to the universal in the race.

We select and set aside as literature that which is original, the product of what we call genius.

We shall scarcely find in Europe a peasantry whose abject poverty is not in some measure alleviated by this power which literature gives them to live outside it.

Do I like being alone so much? Yes—sometimes! Nonsense! I like it very well. So delightful to shut one's eyes and recite aloud without fear of being overheard, or dream golden dreams without the dread of being disturbed; or better still, write page after page with none to cry "Put down that pen before you kill yourself" or read some favorite author as long as one chooses, without having the extinguisher placed over the candle as a night cap.

I can't help feeling that the good books were purchased because they were talked of as being popular, and the trash was bought because it suited best.

In the end, he said he judged the Bible to be a sound book. Nevertheless

To enjoy and learn from what you read you must understand the meanings of the words a writer uses. You do yourself a grave disservice if you read around words you don't know, or worse, merely guess at what they mean without bothering to look them up. For me, reading has always been not only a quest for pleasure and enlightenment but also a word-hunting expedition, a lexical safari.

There are essentially two things that will make us wiser: the books we read and the people we meet.

What," asked Julian without preamble, "did Trelawny snatch from the funeral pyre at Viareggio?" The go-between replied, "Shelley's heart.

It has so much character that it's probably being hunted by a posse of typographers.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was one of the great pioneers of the spy thriller.

If I read something somebody wrote 300 years ago, and it's me, what I'm going through now in my head, it sends chills down my spine, and I feel like that's what I want to be able to offer — that if I offer myself, there's a chance somebody else will feel connected.

We went to a Barnes and Noble, where I picked up an unauthorized biography of M.C. Hammer, and not wanting to overload her on her first book, I steered Dumb Dumb toward a Choose Your Own Adventure.

In my definition I am a protest writer, with restraint.

The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures, and situations.

I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different colour, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.

Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do - it can make us identify with situations and people far away.

The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn deep into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures, and situations.

Decolonising the Mind, by an important African writer and revolutionary, Ng?g? wa Thiong'o.

We wrote about politics so you can write about daffodils