Quotes About Literature

Surprisingly, it was not an American but a British company that opened an amusement park in 2007 called Dickens World, located in the English county of Kent, complete with an Ebenezer Scrooge Haunted House, a Great Expectations Boat Ride and the as-advertised 'costumed Dickensian characters.'

Oddly, for a book to do well merely because people like it is surprisingly rare.

Art and literature are my surrogate religions.

But as I sat in that bed, the book in my hands, the city outside silent, I had reason to feel as if a hand from some sub-zero hell had reached up and laid itself-oh, very gently-upon my heart.

Now, the story makes no reference to specific years—it uses that eighteen-followed-by-a-dash business which writers were so fond of in those days, I've never understood why

Books are not missiles, you don't aim them at anybody

Ralph also took some classes in philosophy and literature and felt himself on the brink of some kind of huge discovery about himself. But it never came.

My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.

Though he continued to take classes here and there in the sciences and in business, Ralph also took some classes in philosophy and literature and felt himself on the brink of some kind of huge discovery about himself. But it never came.

There are significant moments in everyone's day that can make literature. That's what you ought to write about.

La letteratura, poi, ha questo di bello: che puoi riacciuffarla in un momento qualunque del tuo percorso, che non scade mai, che non abbandona mai davvero le librerie.

He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.

The most durable thing in writing is style. It is a projection of personality and you have to have a personality before you can project it. It is the product of emotion and perception.

All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity.

All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech.

Hammett was the ace performer... He is said to have lacked heart; yet the story he himself thought the most of [The Glass Key] is the record of a man's devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.

A classical education saves you from being fooled by pretentiousness, which is what most current fiction is too full of.

All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page...

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

He [James Cain] is every kind of writer I detest...a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking.

But this Hemingway stuff is what really has me down. A gag, I said. An old, old gag. Who is this Hemingway person at all? A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good. That must take a hell of a long time, the big man said.

Los editores y otros deberían dejar de preocuparse por la pérdida de clientela que puede causarles la televisión. El tipo que puede soportar un trío de anuncios de desodorantes para mirar a Flashgun Casey y tragarse los elogios a cervezas o a planes usuarios de crédito para poder ver a un par de boxeadores de cuarta frotándose las narices contra las cuerdas no es alguien que vaya a perder tiempo leyendo libros.

Hemingway says somewhere that the good writer competes only with the dead.

Uh-huh. Could be,' I said. It was a spot for a paragraph of lucid prose. Henry Clarendon IV would have obliged. I didn't have a damn thing more to say.