Quotes About Literature

under the tuition of the poets.

She loved her daughter, the blessing of a good book, a glass of wine after the day's wave of vanity had passed.

You can be too rich and too thin, but you can never be too well read or too curious about the world.

Perfume the literature you write with only the finest inks, for literature works are luscious girls, and ink their precious perfume. —Arabic saying ~800 AD

Mi always thought of him as living in a body one size smaller than his being - part of him always rushing forward beyond the rest of him, leaving part of him behind. [...] Skin-tight, expressionless - and your self made up of dreams and stories - Boy Carlton - Boy Balfour - Boy Hannay. I know all your heroes, my dear one - I gave you the books in which you found them.

why would Caesar fear Ovid, except for knowing that neither his divinity nor all his legions could protect him from a good line of poetry.

It is the devious writer indeed who writes in such a way that the critic who finds himself unresponsive to the writer's vision feels like a philistine.

When I read a novel I am not only surrendering; I am allowing my mind to be occupied by a colonizer of uncertain intent

The Arda Viraf ("Viraf the just"), which was probably written during the Sassanid period, tells the story of a devout Zoroastrian who travels to heaven and hell and returns to Earth to report what he found. Several centuries later, Dante Alighieri (1265–1341) would write a similar but much longer work, the Divine Comedy, from a Christian perspective.

To hear some thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries say it, the people of Greece had it all figured out two millennia ago. That's not even remotely true, but what ancient Greece did accomplish in terms of science, architecture, literature, art, and philosophy is certainly enough to explain why so many people have come away with the impression.

BORN: 1856 George Bernard Shaw (Man and Superman, Major Barbara), Dublin 1894 Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, Crome Yellow), Godalming, England DIED: 1934 Winsor McCay

Actually, he hadn't just complained; she'd come home from school one afternoon and found him stabbing his paperback edition with a steak knife, the tip of the blade penetrating the cover and sinking far enough down into the early chapters that he sometimes had trouble pulling it out. When she asked him what he was doing, he explained in a calm and serious voice that he was trying to kill the book before it killed him.

found him stabbing his paperback edition with a steak knife, the tip of the blade penetrating the cover and sinking far enough down into the early chapters

The sky was the color of Edgar Allen Poe's pajamas.

nothing the human race has ever invented is more cool than a book.

When it comes to coolness, nothing the human race has ever invented is more cool than a book.

Hemingway and Norman Mailer might have disagreed, but there is no heavyweight champion of literature.

I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.

One of his students was an intense young man who was interested in writing fiction. My father lent him some books and talked to him for hours about the art of the novel. The boy went on to write a novel himself, a colorful fantasy about New Orleans, but no one wanted to publish it. He later killed himself. His name was John Kennedy Toole

He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.

VALENTINE: Are you talking about Lord Byron, the poet? BERNARD: No, you fucking idiot, we're talking about Lord Byron, the chartered accountant.

I fell in love with literature and stayed lovesick all my life.

anyone with a secretary knows that what Catullus really wrote was already corrupt by the time it was copied twice...

Your art has failed. You've turned literature into a religion and it's as dead as all the rest, it's an overripe corpse and you're cutting fancy figures at the wake. It's too late for geniuses! Now we need vandals and desecrators, simple-minded demolition men to smash centuries of baroque subtlety, to bring down the temple, and thus finally, to reconcile the shame and the necessity of being an artist!