Quotes About Literature

If people didn't read books on the subway, underground journeys would be dreary.

I was an English major in college who concentrated in African-American literature and culture. So I read quite a few slave narratives and stories of escape, and I grew up in Ohio, which was a common stop on the Underground Railroad.

Underground literature only began in the '70s, when technical developments made it possible. Before that, we were involved in a game with the censors. That was our struggle.

I've always been interested in a certain kind of sophistication in children's literature. I loved Roald Dahl; I loved the underlying nastiness of some of his - darkness of his tales.

An interesting thing about book groups, it seems to me, is that there is no correlation between a brilliant book and a brilliant discussion. The first seems sometimes even to undermine the second.

I don't read reviews if I know in advance they're negative, because I can't have my confidence undermined when I'm writing.

DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word 'accessible.'

Students read for tests and because their parents ask them to, but I think it's very important to tell children that you can read for fun, too, and to understand human spirit. It builds empathy.

It's understandable why someone might not want to take on a book they think is emotionally hard.

I think the international appeal of SF is quite understandable since the kinds of people who like to read it, are, by the nature of the beast, interested in other cultures, of which other nations on Earth are the closest available example.

It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.

There are few things that are more revealing about someone than the way that they talk about a piece of literature or a play. You very quickly come to have a much deeper understanding of someone than you would if you just mingled together in a pub saying, 'All right, how are you?'

Read with care, George Orwell's diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

I can't imagine not being able to read and write, or make these connections from literature and philosophy that have helped inform my understanding of evolution.

Thanks to nanny, I've got a deep understanding of Russian tales.

You can be interested in a Jane Smiley novel whether or not anyone says a word. She enters into her characters' thoughts with great understanding and depth.

Well, as a kid I did not get Shakespeare. I just never understood it.

I studied English at Princeton in the early eighties in what I consider a period of high obscurity. Professors and students ran around discussing the work of critics and philosophers that I doubt they'd read or understood.

Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.

Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.

In a very literal way, of course, Shakespeare did change the course of history: when it didn't fit the plot he had in mind, he simply rewrote it. His English histories play fast and loose with chronology and fact to achieve the desired dramatic effect, re-ordering history even as it was then understood.

For years I'd understood that publishing in paperback was the kiss of death.