Quotes About Literature

Hemingway dice en alguna parte que el buen escritor compite únicamente con los muertos.

This was more like it, a narrowed cluttered little shop stacked with books from floor to ceiling and four or five browsers taking their time- putting thumb marks on the new jackets. Nobody paid any attention to them.

Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her . . . that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.

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 men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts. It is part of the process of life among thinking beings.

C'est en écrivant qu'on devient écriveron

I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for Virginia Woolf to make up her novels

A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.

I look over at my hero shelf and see Philip Levine, Rainer Maria Rilke, Virginia Woolf, Shunryu Suzuki, Adrienne Rich, Pablo Neruda, Subcomandante Marcos, Eduardo Galeano, James Baldwin. These books are, if they are instructions at all, instructions in extending our identities out into the world, human and nonhuman, in imagination as a great act of empathy that lifts you out of yourself, not locks you down into your gender. ("80 Books No Woman Should Read")

There are good and great books on the Esquire list, though even Moby-Dick, which I love, reminds me that a book without women is often said to be about humanity, but a book with women in the foreground is a woman's book.

After all, many people make babies; only one made To the Lighthouse and Three Guineas...

Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street.

I just think some books are instructions on why women are dirt or hardly exist at all except as accessories or are inherently evil and empty.

In my case, this meant identifying with male protagonists, with the Jim of the almost womanless Lord Jim and Jim Carroll's self-anointing stud junkie in The Basketball Diaries and with Pip rather than Estella in Great Expectations, and all the grail seekers and ring beaters and western explorers and chasers and conquerors and haters of women and inhabitants of worlds where women were absent.

In a sense these books on walks for their own sakes are the literature of paradise, the story of what can happen when nothing profound is wrong, and so the protagonist—healthy, solvent, uncommitted—can set out seeking minor adventure. In paradise, the only things of interest are our own thoughts, the character of our companions, and the incidents and appearance of the surroundings.

A Book Is a Heart That Only Beats in the Chest of Another. ~Rebecca Solnit on the Solitary Intimacy of Reading and Writing

I have been in recent years the author of a bestiary and director of some atlas projects; I've written criticism, editorials, reports from a few front lines, letters, a great many political essays . . ., more personal stuff, essays for artists' books, and more. . . . Nonfiction is the whole realm from investigative journalism to prose poems, from manifestos to love letters, from dictionaries to packing lists.

If you're lucky, you carry a torch into that dark of Virginia Woolf's, and if you're really lucky you'll sometimes see to whom you've passed it, as I did on that day (and if you're polite, you'll remember who handed it to you).

Ernest Hemingway is also in my non-read zone, because if you learn a lot from Gertrude Stein, you shouldn't be a homophobic, antisemitic misogynist.

Writing is lonely, it's an intimate talk with the undead, with the unborn, with the absent, with strangers , with the readers who may never come to be and who even if they read you will do so weeks, years, decades later.

A Freudian would claim to know what they have and I lack, but intelligence is not situated in the crotch—even if you can write one of Virginia Woolf's long mellifluous musical sentences about the subtle subjugation of women in the snow with your willie.

By now you've noticed that Woolf says "I don't know" quite a lot.

One day in Auschwitz, the writer Primo Levi recited a canto of Dante's Inferno to a companion, and the poem about hell reached out from six hundred years before to roll back Levi's despair and his dehumanization. It was the canto about Ulysses, and though it ends tragically, it contains the lines You were not made to live like animals But to pursue virtue and know the world which he recited and translated to the man walking with him.

For twenty years I have sat alone at a desk tinkering with sentences and then sending them out, and for most of my literary life the difference between throwing something in the trash and publishing it was imperceptible...

A book without women is often said to be about humanity but a book with women in the foreground is a woman's book.