Quotes About Literature

The utmost accolade a writer can receive is that the reader is incognizant of his presence. The writer must put no obstacles in the reader's way. Therefore I try avoid words that he must puzzle over, or that he cannot gloss from context; and when I make up names, I shun the use of diacritical marks that he must sound out, thus halting the flow; and in general, I try to keep the sentences metrically pleasing, so that they do not obtrude upon the reader's mind.

On occasion I read Raymond Chandler although I have certain reservations about this author. Chandler, while obviously a master of his craft, makes overuse of simile, to my annoyance.

Geoffrey Chaucer, the first author in the English language, devoted the longest story in The Canterbury Tales to the Asian conqueror Genghis Khan of the Mongols.

The poem and the drama is not the experience except as we identify ourselves with it, and know what it feels like to have it. What distinguishes literature is that it cannot be understood unless we understand what it is like to be human.

I've got a library copy of Gone with the Wind , a quart of milk and all these cookies. Wow! What an orgy!

Jacqueline Wilson

Jacqueline Wilson

Jacqueline Wilson

Dad reads great fat books too, but they're not modern, they're all classics - Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. If we have a look at Dad's book we wonder what the Dickens they're on about and they seem very Hardy, but Dad likes them.

Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging.

If we are bound and determined to speak in terms of reference, nuclear war is the only possible referent of any discourse and any experience that would share their condition with that of literature. If, according to a structuring hypothesis, a fantasy or phantasm, nuclear war is equivalent to the total destruction of the archive, if not of the human habitat, it becomes the absolute referent, the horizon and the condition of all the others.

Preguntarme por qué no escribo inevitablemente desemboca en otra inquisición mucho más azorante: ¿por qué escribí? Al fin y al cabo, lo normal es leer

Nevertheless we cherish all books, especially the unread ones, for who knows what secrets they might yield one day? —p.397, as by Larry Zagorski, in his short story The City of the Sun

Blackmail is the only refuge of the literate man against barbarism.

I have often been mildly amused when I think that the great American novel was not written about New England or Chicago. It was written about a white whale in the South Pacific.

Only a mind steeped in true love can write irony. The others write satire.

I)f you did not read when you were young, you might never catch the disease and then what would be the use of living?

The opening sentence alone contained thirty-six words—monstrous

There is no reason why any sane person should read Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. It is one of the worst books ever written by an American, shoddy, meretricious and without any redeeming social value.

Books which we still read today were written before these islands were known to anyone except the birds of passage. Songs which we still sing were composed and recorded while these islands remained vacant. The Bible had been compiled, and the Koran.

Reading is the best return on investment. You have to live your entire life in order to know one life. But with reading you can know 1000s of people's lives for almost no cost. What a great return!

Raymond Chandler's first novel came out at 51.

You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even but a millimeter the way people look at reality, then you can change it.

Literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks at reality, then you can change it.