Quotes About Literature

I want to work in literature-based movies in Bengal as this is the specialty of the Bengali film industry.

At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all.

Magic Realism is not new. The label's new, the specific Latin American form of it is new, its modern popularity is new, but it's been around as long as literature has been around.

Y.A. wasn't really a specific genre when I was fifteen, but if it was, I would probably have shunned it; I was a huge snob.

The censors have always had a field day with James Joyce, specifically with 'Ulysses,' but also with his other writings. The conventional wisdom is that this is because of sexually explicit passages (and there certainly are those). I have always thought that what the critics hated and feared about Joyce is his cry for human freedom.

If a spectator with a philosophical mind, somebody accustomed to reading books, gets the same kind of information in a movie, he might not fully understand it.

I find women as writers and as characters are operating within narrow confines. They inherit a kind of ghetto of the soul. I'm trying to enlarge the spectrum.

I met Donald Barthelme when I was 30, and it's fair to say that before that moment, I was pre-modern, and after I met him, I was nudged rather forcefully towards this other end of the spectrum.

I'm rereading Jenny Offill's 'Dept. of Speculation.' I love it, and she's just a magician. Line by line and paragraph by paragraph, it's mesmerizing and so intricately plotted and so nimble.

Shakespeare and Rembrandt have in common the faculty of quickening speculation and compelling the minds of men to combat and discussion.

Literature is the immortality of speech.

Henry James's later works would have been better had he resisted that curious sort of self-indulgence, dictating to a secretary. The roaming garrulousness of ordinary speech is usually corrected when it's transcribed into written prose.

A great speech is literature.

Dying, we tell ourselves, is like going to sleep. This figure of speech occurs very commonly in everyday thought and language, as well as in the literature of many cultures and many ages. It was apparently quite common even in the time of the ancient Greeks.

In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap.

It's much easier to read the stories that have a lot of dialogue; of course, they flow much more easily into speech.

Readers in general are not fond of dialect, and I don't blame them. I've read books myself that I've had to put down because sounding out every speech gave me a headache.

I think J.D. Salinger is correct in granting no interviews, and in making no speeches.

When I was 13 or 14, I took this speed-reading course. A lot of the things you do in speed reading you shouldn't do to a good author, but I've been reading really fast ever since.

I have been writing since I was old enough to spell. I have never considered not writing.

Eight years ago, I was drawn into Keats's world by Andrew Motion's biography. Soon I was reading back and forth between Keats's letters and his poems. The letters were fresh, intimate and irreverent, as though he were present and speaking. The Keats spell went very deep for me.

I spent many hours ensconced in the local library, reading - nay, devouring - book after book after book. Books were my soul's delight.

Having spent the greater part of my life under a Communist dictatorship, I am very familiar with the Bolshevik mentality according to which an author in general, and an eminent author in particular, is always guilty, and must be punished accordingly.

After college, I spent a decade working the kinds of jobs that I write about - bartender, shoe salesman, kitchen man - while voraciously reading novels.