Quotes About Literature

I wrote a novel. It's called 'The Middlesteins.' It's fiction. It's not a memoir. I'm not a spokesperson.

The dusk was performing its customary intransitive operation of "gathering".

I do think that short story writing is often a matter of luck.

The novelists of the nineteeth century had all the luck. They had a huge and easily pleased public and the world they surveyed had every appearance of permanence.

Of course I had a piece of luck I couldn't have imagine for myself in a million years: I got an agent. That sped up the process. I'd say it's a good idea, getting an agent.

Americans and their desire to be novelists, the American novel should be listed in medical dictionaries alongside Megalomania and Obsessional Neuroses.

Real miracles bother people, like strange sudden pains unknown in medical literature.

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

I felt the comics grew because they became the common man's literature, the common man's art, the common man's publishing.

I don't think there's been any writer like Samuel Beckett. He's unique. He was a most charming man and I used to send him my plays.

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.

The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.

A recluse without books and ink is already in life a dead man.

For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.

I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

I find it easy to forgive the man who invented a devilish instrument like dynamite, but how can one ever forgive the diabolical mind that invented the Nobel Prize in Literature?

They had always told me that I wrote like a man.

She regarded books as the emblems of secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn't possibly hurt her.

No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman.

If a man's house is full of medicine bottles, we infer the man is an invalid. But if his house is full of books, we conclude he is intelligent.

Job is perhaps the oldest piece of literature known to man. How did Job know the Earth is suspended in space? Job could only know through divine inspiration.

A man's library is a sort of harem.

His books were the closest thing he had to furniture and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.