Quotes About Literature

As the years pass, I find that writers who were once central to me aren't anymore. I revered Yeats's poetry in college. I respect it now and am still ravished by certain lines, but I don't go back to him again and again. I do go back to Emily Dickinson again and again.

There were no small brown kids as the centre of the children's fiction I grew up with.

The music wasn't going to happen, and I realized I had read so little. I didn't know my way around any century. I was very under read.

The magic word 'Shakespeare' always freezes you in your chair.

I am one of maybe three people in the world who knows anything about Robert W. Chambers.

To me, characters are at the heart of great literature.

I love Charles Baudelaire. Him and Shakespeare are the only people I think are better than me.

I grew up around writers, and there was always a romance to them. They were charming. They would tell their stories of what they were working on, over the table.

I want to tell people to read 'The Prince' by Machiavelli - check that one out. It's just changed my attack so - I think so much more inwardly.

I didn't even know for years that people ever even got paid for this, because they don't teach you that in school. They don't say Shakespeare got a check.

I like to go back over history and check out what people have written and whether I agree with it or not.

I'm evangelical on the subject of some chefs and writers.

You know, you hear about these writers reading 'Lolita' at 12. I wanted to be a chemistry teacher.

I think that there's a lot of guys out there that want to read the equivalent of chick lit, but really there's not being much written for them.

I don't think my first book was chick lit.

In Australia, the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle.

Well, I write in exile because I cannot return to my country, so I have no choice but to see myself as an exiled writer.

I read 'Love in the Time of Cholera' when I was 19, and I still think about the characters.

Reading should be a pleasure, not a chore.

I'm a big fan of Elmore Leonard, and I've read Ian Rankin, Christopher Brookmyre and so on. But I'd never read a crime novel that made me feel emotional at the end.

Christopher Knowles, Buechner, Heiner Mueller, Burroughs, Chekhov, Shakespeare - it's all one body of work.

I think cinema is linked to literature by a lot of social ways. Our brains are full of literature - my brain is.

I do think that books, good books, free you. They make you feel a citizen of the world and things like class, sex and age don't matter. They're the greatest leveler.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.