Quotes About Literature

Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories.

I'm not sure that when I read 'Treasure Island' for the first time, when I was about 10, I understood all the words or what was going on. But that didn't stop me reading it, and I certainly didn't forget it.

You feel undervalued when you write the kind of fiction I write.

I must say that books in India are not only underpriced but are also undervalued.

I don't know anybody in the underworld. I make this stuff up. I don't know any criminals.

DeLillo has said that he no longer feels a compulsion to write long, compendious books. In his later years, Saul Bellow said something similar. DeLillo, of course, has written very long in the past, notably with the 850-page Underworld (1997), and his story has been America.

'Underworld' was my first filmed book. I think there are about seven of my lines in it.

'The Truth About Lorin Jones' will undoubtedly shock and offend as many readers as it will amuse, since it dares to make fun of feminism - of its manners, if not its politics.

I don't think of literary novels as self-help documents, although literature undoubtedly saved my life when I was young, enabling me to disappear into all manner of stories, to recognise feelings that I felt alone in.

Shakespeare is undoubtedly the greatest dramatist the world has known, and 95 countries translate his work into their languages.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

There should be unemployment insurance for fictional people.

Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.

Vladimir Nabokov on 'Bleak House' or Henry James on 'The House of the Seven Gables' prove that reading can be an exciting subject in itself, full of passionate encounters, contradictory judgments, striking discoveries, and unexpected reversals.

I see my books as a body of work, in my opinion, of singular importance and deeply disrespected in a way that is savagely unfair.

The disappointing second novel is measured against the brilliant first novel - often no novel lives up to the first. Literary improvement seems like an unfair expectation.

Most of the time, comparing printed song lyrics with poems is like comparing recipes with food: that's to say, patently unfair.

I think literature can make familiar the unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar is very much about the dispossessed, and so the value of literature seems to me to go into the stories that not everybody wants to tell.

Although I did admire David Foster Wallace's final unfinished novel about boredom, I'm no DFW, and I want my books to be exciting, not boring.

I love to read, and TV seemed more like a good book, with these incredible series unfolding like chapters in a novel.

I'm sometimes asked if I get bored with talking about 'Kevin,' and of course, the short answer is yes. Nevertheless, after a long slog in the literary trenches, I never take a single reader for granted and always remind myself that for new readers the unfolding story is fresh.

As a child, I read a great many books in which animals and birds played significant roles, not only in the narrative itself, but also in creating the emotional and psychological atmosphere of that narrative - the imaginative furniture, as it were, in which any story unfolds.

I actually don't read comic books. I did when I was a kid - I used to read a lot of 'X-Men' comic books. I read a couple 'Scott Pilgrim' this past year, and those are really good, but I don't read in general, unfortunately.

Why are we reading a Shakespeare play or 'Huckleberry Finn?' Well, because these works are great, but they also tell us something about the times in which they were created. Unfortunately, previous eras and dead authors often used language or accepted as normal sentiments that we now find unacceptable.