Quotes About Literature

My political position springs from my being a novelist. In so far as I am concerned, politics and the novel are an indivisible case and I can categorically state that I became politically committed because I am a novelist, not the opposite.

Lest we forget that Shakespeare spelled his surname in five different ways. None of them was S H A K E S P E A R E.

If you have not done things worthy of being written about, at least write things worthy of being read.

if you have not done anything worthy of being recorded, at least write something worthy of being read.

Everything since Homer has improved, except poetry.

In the old days, books had awful covers and marvelous content; nowadays, the opposite happens.

but clearly the hypothesis, put forth in another note, of a future split into "two kinds of poetry and literature, one for the knowledgeable, the other for ordinary people" (Z 4388) seems now, two centuries later, to be prophetic.

But what came easily to Homer (and to Xenophon, in prose) was no longer easily available to the moderns, who introduced the presence of the representing subject into representation itself (Byron being a prime example in the Zibaldone).

Tutto si è perfezionato da Omero in poi, ma non la poesia.

preliterate authors, such as Homer, who cannot be grammatically constrained,

Zanzotto ricorda che la nonna dialettofona, la nonna popolana recitava a lui piccolo versi familiari del Tasso, e quell'armonia del toscano illustre filtrava nella sua coscienza come "una vera e propria droga fonica, sopra il continuum un po' selvatico della parlata dialettale".

They had read of the albatross in the book of the bombed-out palace.

Dove ci sono buone notizie non c'è letteratura - chi lo ha detto? La letteratura esiste solo per indagare le meccaniche dell'infelicità; se no è spazzatura, è robaccia commerciale, a prescindere. In ogni caso per evitare equivoci, tu sei sempre stato d'accordo con questa idea di letteratura. Il che è normale, se sei un intellettuale fallito.

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice... and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.

Shakespeare's bitter play [Troilus and Cressida] is therefore a dramatization of a part of a translation into English of the French translation of a Latin imitation of an old French expansion of a Latin epitome of a Greek romance. (p. 55)

Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots.

A good novel tells you the truth about its hero but a bad novel tells you the truth about its author.

Un lecteur est un être qui manque d'imagination, car autrement il s'écrirait lui-même ses propres fictions.

What is the line between the living female body and the dysfunctional portrait that has been drawn of it in literature and psychology and medicine?

Ha önök írók volnának - mindenképpen azok, ugyanis az olvasó ugyanúgy szerz?je a m?nek, akár az író -, hogyan folytatnák ezt a történetet?

escribía sus Elogios de los escritores célebres

Se se suprimissem a muitos amores as guarnições da literatura, a cópia dos gestos, os motivos do útil, os mecanismos do hábito, encontrar-se-ia como único e verdadeiro fundamento, a avidez do coito. O homem é um varrão que se envergonha da sua suinidade.

I said. "But there are bibliophiles the world over it would reduce to tears of joy." No exaggeration. Harley's [book] collection's worth a million-six...

Why do people who read Shakespeare still spend hours watching shitty TV or staring out of the window or arguing about whose dinner party to go to?