Quotes About Literature

Please, never despise the translator. He's the mailman of human civilization.

There is nothing more dangerous to the formation of a prose style than the endeavour to make it poetic.

A good writer is basically a story-teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

I believe the writer... should always be the final judge. I have always held to that position and have sometimes seen books hurt thereby, but at least as often helped. The book belongs to the author.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book.

Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones.

The pen is mightier than the sword. The [??n!$] is mightier than the pen.

Age 59. — With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.

Before he was seventeen, Flaubert was reading Victor Hugo, Byron, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Montaigne, and early acquired the conviction that there was no such thing as indecency in true literature. For a while, the literature of the schoolmasters seemed to him not to be literature at all.

I reckoned they had probably begun to pour out their hearts and entrust each other with the subjects of the plays and novels they had written or planned to write. It was customary after serious drinking.

What do these children do without story books? Naftali asked. And Reb Zebulun replied: They have to make do. Storybooks aren't bread. You can live without them. I couldn't live without them. Naftali said.

My books already threatened to take over my part of the room and keep on going . . . whatever cargoes of words I could lay my hands on I gave safe harbor.

What a wealth we are granted, in the books that carry the best in us through time.

The verses which he published in various reviews from time to time, and the neatly copied poems which he sent to his friends, superiors, and important personages, were neither much better nor much worse than thousands of other verse products of the day.

What is it that frightens you, Councillor Maximov? When you read about Karamzin or Karamzov or whatever his name is, when Karamzin's skull is cracked open like an egg, what is the truth: do you suffer with him, or do you secretly exult behind the arm that swings the axe? You don't answer? Let me tell you then: reading is being the arm and being the axe and being the skull; reading is giving yourself up, not holding yourself at a distance and jeering.

Many of these books were quite good, most were middle-of-the-road, and a few brought to mind a review by Dorothy Parker, in which she stated, "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

If a man is known by the company he keeps, so also his character is reflected in the books he reads.

A vid comes to you, even at you. It's visual, it's auditory, and can, of course, pull you in. Its purpose is to do just that, draw you into the world you see and hear. But a book? You go into it. There's no visual or auditory other than what forms in your own mind. You visualize the characters, the scene, through the words. You, as reader, interpret the tone of voice, the colors, the movement as you physically turn the pages.

Brodie said. "I've done a little work on a few of your places.

For the price of the download or hard copy, anyone can own the book and read it countless times.

La literatura es un arte que sabe profetizar aquel tiempo en que habrá enmudecido, [...] y enamorarse de la propia disolución y cortejar su fin.