Quotes About Literature

Plato wove historical fact into literary myth.

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.

For me, there was no great myth around the movies when I was a young child. My father was very simple about the whole thing. He did not consider cinema an art. Cinema was entertainment. Literature and music were art.

The myth of Naipaul... has long been a farce.

There are not so many mythical creatures from Inkheart.

We read Greek and Norse mythology until it came out of our ears. And the Bible.

Nobody in America, in the modern generation, has read their mythology or legends.

I'm very much a word-centric writer, and that comes from the literature and the reading that I did as kid and also the films and mythology and stories.

A lot of people have something to say about 'Wuthering Heights,' but nobody quite nails it.

I have some role models. In Brazil, they are mostly writers. A writer named Afonso Henriques de Lima Barreto is my favorite. Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis is also a very important figure for me.

I was enamored with Charles Dickens as a kid, and his names blew me away.

I always feel I'm better known in England than I am here in the U.S. Americans don't read that much, and the French are very good at knowing the names of everybody.

If you were to ask me to pick my favourite author, well, there are so many of them, I'd really just have to say the first names that came to mind, and I'm sure that I'll later think 'Oh, I should have mentioned that one.'

All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me; if I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment with names new to me, I would be starved - probably too starved to go on writing myself.

For a writer, the Book Festival is interesting because you bump into all these other writers whose work you know, whose names you know, and you have a chance to put a person with the name and the work.

Some writers you return to again and again, and for me, Nancy Mitford is one of them.

I still think I'm writing Nancy Drew with a mortgage.

I still don't think I've ever read a Nancy Drew book; I probably read three or four 'Hardy Boys' books when I was 10, 11, 12, and I didn't love them at the time. Even then, they felt dated to me, like the word chum - 'my chum and I.' However, the 'Encyclopedia Brown' books, I read all of them.

At first I imagined I'd write detective novels, because I loved 'Nancy Drew.'

When I was 15 my great Aunt Nancy gave me a book of Alan Bennett plays, and I thought he was the bees knees.

The narration, in fact, doubles the drama with a commentary without which no mise en scene would be possible.

Once I got into college, I discovered literature - in particular, multicultural literature. I just started to understand the power of story and narrative, and you know, like anyone else, I kind of wanted to do it, too.

Let's stop reflexively comparing Chinese writers to Chinese writers, Indian writers to Indian writers, black writers to black writers. Let's focus on the writing itself: the characters, the language, the narrative style.

Growing up, I mostly read comic books and sci-fi. Then I discovered the book 'Jane Eyre' by Jane Austen. It introduced me to the world of romance, which I have since never left. Also, the world of the first-person narrative.