Quotes About Literature

I think one of the few faults in Dickens is that mostly his lead characters are blanks - who is David Copperfield, who is Oliver Twist? And yet he takes such joy in populating the rest of his novels with these fantastic, grotesque people like Pecksmith and so on.

For me, the worst writing generally just 'flips' things: this person's really a traitor; it was all a dream; etc. Nothing is so ruinous as a forced 'twist,' I think.

There was a time when people liked to take Shakespeare and twist him around to make whatever social or political statement they wanted to make.

My pictures of 'Oliver Twist' and 'A Boy in Flanders' are being used as school lessons.

I don't Twitter or blog. I'm bad at small talk, and don't have good 'chat'. Talk to me about publishing, and I can go on for hours.

I've gone to readings to see authors after meeting them on Twitter. And while there, I've found myself sitting next to still more writers who I met on Twitter, too.

I love Twitter, and my little corner of it is heavily weighted in favour of women, many of them writers: Caitlin Moran, India Knight, Lauren Laverne, Grace Dent, Deborah Orr, Marina Hyde, Suzanne Moore. I look at that list of names and think, 'Here comes the fun - fun that knows its way around a dictionary.'

'The Devil's Dictionary' reads like a collection of great Twitter posts. And as people do with tweets, they can swipe Bierce's best lines and recite them as nearly their own. The reflected glory of reposting.

Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.

Science, literature, and common sense tell us that the self is a fickle thing, subject to revision in real time, and that the chasm that exists between any two people exists inside each and every one of us.

I try to get through a book every two weeks.

I read a lot for me. But I'm not one of those people who gets 'The New York Times' book review and runs out and buys 10 books and is done with them and passing them out to friends, you know, two weeks later.

Jonathan Lethem's 10th novel, 'The Blot,' is engaging, entertaining, and sharp for its first two-thirds. Then it goes to hell.

Not as ours the books of old - Things that steam can stamp and fold; Not as ours the books of yore - Rows of type, and nothing more.

It is commonly asserted and accepted that Paradise Lost is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement in our literature.

I read all types of books. I read Christian books, I read black novels, I read religious books. I read stuff like 'Rich Dad, Poor Dad' and 'The Dictator's Handbook' and then I turned around and read science-fiction novels.

Sometimes there's a snobbery among literary types that these people don't really get it, but in a lot of ways they get it more than the literati. There's a culture in the background that they understand and know. They get that deeper level.

Some literary types subscribe to the notion that being a writer like Salinger entitles a person to remain free of the standards that might apply to mere mortals.

If you've written a powerful book about a woman and your publisher then puts a 'feminine' image on the cover, it 'types' the book.

Certainly, there is a tendency to lump women who write similar types of books together, and it's not just in crime, is it? Women's fiction is supposedly a whole genre of itself. There's no male equivalent.

I would be concerned if one of my children were constantly watching nothing but horror films or indulging in gothic literature without the balance of other types of art and entertainment. I do think that's a danger.

I think people in the north and the south and the east and the west, anywhere they come from, are just as interesting, and they're humans. They have the same realm of emotions that we all have. But I'm just more drawn to the Southern character and the different types, and Southern literature is so lyrical and so wonderful.

I had a little portable typewriter. I call it my Harlem Literary Fellowship.

Harper Lee and Truman Capote became friends as next-door neighbors in the late 1920s, when they were about kindergarten age. From the start, they recognized in each other "an apartness," as Capote later expressed it; and both loved reading. When Lee's father gave them an old Underwood typewriter, they began writing original stories together.