Quotes About Literature

All men begin their learning with Homer.

Personally, I do not believe that it is the duty of any man or woman to write a novel. In nine cases out of ten, there would be greater merit in leaving it unwritten.

If a man wants to read good books, he must make a point of avoiding bad ones; for life is short, and time and energy limited.

When a man can observe himself suffering and is able, later, to describe what he's gone through, it means he was born for literature.

Man's greatest drive is not love or hate but to change another person's writing.

A little library, growing every year, is an honorable part of a man's history. It is a man's duty to have books.

and nothing was worse than getting stuck in a situation like that with nothing to read.

SF does possess at least two of the classic markers of genrehood, namely intellectual disreputability and moral salaciousness. SF thrives because it is idea porn.

Has anyone you know ever been ritually mutilated because they were seen reading a book?

That man behaves so much like the villain in a work of literature, it's almost funny," Arsibalt observed.

If you don't run with this crowd, you might assume that SF is an abbreviation of Science Fiction. But here it means Speculative Fiction. This coinage is a way to cope with the problem that Science Fiction is mysteriously, inextricably conjoined with the seemingly unrelated literature of Fantasy. Many who are fond of one are fond of the other, to the point where they perceive them as The Same Thing in spite of the fact that they seem quite different to non-fans.

Classics-based sci-fi is nothing new. To name the most recent of many examples, the novelist Dan Simmons published "Ilium" and "Olympos," science-fictional takes on Homer. When

nothing was worse than getting stuck in a situation like that with nothing to read. Elsewhere

The stuff was tremendous, like drinking your favorite book.

That man behaves so much like the villain in a work of literature, it's almost funny," Arsibalt observed. "Yes," said one of the Hundreders, "it's as if he'd never heard of foreshadowing.

found myself jealous of the people who wrote the books. They were dead and they were still taking up my time. Who did they think they were?

The less he sees of other writers the more of a writer he will ultimately become. When he sees scarcely anyone except other writers, he is ready for New York.

I am the penny whistle of American literature.

American literature isn't anybody phoning to anybody or anybody writing about anybody. American literature is the woman in the courtroom who, finding herself undefended on a charge, asked, 'Isn't anybody on my side?' It's also the phrase I used that was once used in court of a kid who, on being sentenced to death, said, 'I knew I'd never get to be twenty-one anyhow.

There were two display windows, one on each side of the door, and in the windows were…well, books. What this street really needed was a bar.

Professor O'Leary was Professor of Mediaeval Literature at Ann Arbor University in Michigan, just outside Detroit.

Written words can also sing.

Above all things -- read. Read the great stylists who cannot be copied rather than the successful writers who must not be copied.

Gibbon's breathtaking chapter on early Christianity (volume I, chapter 15 of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) or in Candide, Voltaire's devastating mockery of Leibniz's claim that 'all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds'.m