Quotes About Literature

A written man is more porous and accessible than a live one.

The closest he comes to explaining why he found it gay is to say that like Virginia Woolf, it showed a woman defeating a man. Presumably a straight man could never imagine such a thing.

Short stories are often treated as the poor cousins of novels.

Cunningham himself said in an interview in Poz that he couldn't help noticing that as soon as he wrote a novel without a blowjob, they gave him the Pulitzer Prize.

If everyone took antidepressants, Chekhov would have had nothing to write about.

Christopher Fowler

When sleep eludes you, embrace wakefulness, he told himself, and read until dawn.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and—since there is no other metaphor—also the soul.

A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless'...

The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.

We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.

Authors who moan with praise for their editors always seem to reek slightly of the Stockholm syndrome.

My hope is that literature can replace religion as the source of our ethics, without ceasing to be a pleasurable study and pursuit in its own right

Everything I love: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression.

There must be some connection between the general nullity of Christie's prose and the tendency of her detectives to take Jewishness as a symptom of crime.

I had not particularly liked the way in which he wrote about literature in Beginnings , and I was always on my guard if not outright hostile when any tincture of 'deconstruction' or 'postmodernism' was applied to my beloved canon of English writing, but when Edward talked about English literature and quoted from it, he passed the test that I always privately apply: Do you truly love this subject and could you bear to live for one moment if it was obliterated?

I defend Salman Rushdie because it a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression

Bad as political fiction can be, there is always a politician prepared to make it look artistic by comparison.

I have tried to write about politics in an allusive manner that draws upon other interests and to approach literature and criticism without ignoring the political dimension. Even if I have failed in this synthesis, I have found the attempt worth making.

On page 605, Blumenthal says that 'I made friends with Hitchens's friends the novelists Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie.' True in its way. I particularly remember the occasion when he called me up and invited me to dinner with Dick Morris, but only on condition that I brought Rushdie (who was staying in my house) along with me. No Rushdie: no invitation. So I never did get to meet Dick Morris.

A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so.

Real horror of the porcine is manifest all over the Islamic world. One good instance would be the continued prohibition of George Orwell's Animal Farm, one of the most charming and useful fables of modern times, of the reading of which Muslim schoolchildren are deprived. I have perused some of the solemn prohibition orders written by Arab education ministries, which are so stupid that they fail to notice the evil and dictatorial role played by the pigs in the story itself.

But Islam when examined is not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms, helping itself from earlier books and traditions as occasion appeared to require.

There was also the time that competitors were asked to submit a paragraph of a Graham Greene parody: Greene himself entered under a pseudonym and placed third.