Quotes About Literature

Ohio is historically a healthy place for science fiction writers

He flipped through the biggest book imaginable, the dictionary, a book that contained and explained every word in the language, he said. The print was so small it looked like print for a mouse to read.

But Fin would always be a bit of a romantic, at least when it came to books.

Copyediting is helping the words survive the misconceptions of their authors.

If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and it is at this specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the language of literature meet.

My ninth-grade teacher told us that we would all fall in love with Catcher in the Rye. The elusive maroon cover added to its mystique. I kept waiting to fall in love with Salinger's cramped, desultory writing until I was annoyed.

There is no immediate emotional release in the literature of minor feelings. It is cumulative. Change is measured in the internal "waverings of the mind" or in shape-shifting personae.

It's as if readers relish white male writers behaving badly but they demand that minority writers must always be good.

The ethnic literary project has always been a humanist project in which nonwhite writers must prove they are human beings who feel pain. Will there be a future where I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain?

That meant that not only must I cathect myself to the entitled white protagonist but then mourn for the loss of his precious childhood as if it were my own in overrated classics like Catcher in the Rye.

John Waters. He said we need to make books cool again. So if you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck them.

But that, Flavius, hardly nice or honest This thy folly, methinks Catullus also

Disappointment is a beautiful woman reading Ayn Rand.

I never promised I would write the truth. I

Als je het opschrijft, staat het meteen op papier ook.

De toekomst blijft, dunkt mij, aan de figuratieve kunst, zoals ook in de literatuur de toekomst zal blijven aan het samenhangende verhaal met een begin en een einde -liefst met een conventionele interpunctie- en aan het samenhangende gedicht, beide tot stand gebracht in beheerst en bekwaam taalgebruik, en beide hoe geheimzinnig van inhoud ook, aan de oppervlakte een duidelijk herkenbare mededeling bevattend.

Above all, for his merciless, contemptuous treatment of Clifford Chatterley, blown to bits in Flanders in 1918, Lawrence can be damned to hell. Damned but not banned.

Think of the Bible and Homer think of Shakespeare and think of me.

Remarks are not literature [said to Hemingway].

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is the first of the last generation.

it is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do.

Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?

It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.