Quotes About Literature

I do love Shirley Jackson, but I don't deserve to be named in connection with her. I remember reading 'The Haunting of Hill House' and having goosebumps for hours. The way she builds narrative pressure in that book is just amazing. I think you could reread it a few times and actually go out of your mind.

I read a lot growing up. It was kind of my comfort, you know; I loved it. I love story. I love narrative. I was academic. I wasn't particularly athletic. I didn't make the drill team. I didn't go out for sports.

Nearly everything that defines much of our daily experiences is consummatory in nature. Yes, we consume products and services. But we also consume life experiences, religious narratives, art, literature, and ideas.

Even though I read voraciously as a child, I never saw myself in books. Without narratives to expand my ideas of who I could be, I accepted the stories others told me about myself, stories which diminished and belittled me and people like me. I want to write against that.

I was an English-literature major, and that's all about stories and narratives.

I inhaled books. I loved Classics Illustrated comic books. These were books that I could afford to buy after I turned in pop bottles for change. 'The Prince and the Pauper,' 'Robinson Crusoe,' 'A Journey to the Center of the Earth.' Male narratives filled with adventure and self-discovery.

You know who my gods are, who I believe in fervently? Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson - she's probably the top - Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats. These are wonderful gods who have gotten me through the narrow straits of life.

There was a hole in Washington fiction, I felt, when I started out. Most D.C. novels were about politics or the federal city or people who lived in Georgetown or Chevy Chase - it was definitely a very narrow focus.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

I read everything from comics to magazines to fiction - I learned to read in English, years before being able to speak a word of it, by reading 'National Geographic.'

I read every one of the books on the shelf marked American Negro Literature. I became a nationalist, a colour nationalist, through the writings of men and women who lived a world away from me.

Authors have a nationality; books do not.

I was born Chinese, and I write in Chinese. I don't think there's any need to evade this... to a writer, as to a person, what matters is not his political label or his nationality, but whether he is a person and whether his work is worth looking at.

The literature of many lands is rich with the tributes that gratitude, admiration and love have paid to the great and honored dead. These tributes disclose the character of nations, the ideals of the human race.

I would be ecstatic if the very first writer to step foot in a Storyknife cabin was an Alaska Native woman writer.

It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author's experience worked out literally.

You need to cultivate love for books, it doesn't come to everyone naturally.

Denn ich ohne Bücher bin nicht ich.

Writing means making things large.

If twentieth-century literature failed Spurgeon anywhere, it failed to produce scholars interested in constructing three-dimensional portraits of the preacher, flaws and all.12 Warts can be as informative as dimples.

The sensuality, delicacy of literature does not exist for me; only the passion, energy and struggle… Most of my friends deplore this: they are always telling me what I should leave out in order to have success. But I know that nothing has more success in the end than an intelligent ferocity.