Quotes About Literature

I really enjoyed reading 'The Da Vinci Code,' but from a literary standpoint, the book did not live up to the hype.

Behind every writer stands a very large bookshelf.

Emerson stands apart from the other poets and essayists of New England, and of English literature generally, as of another order. He is a reversion to an earlier type, the type of the bard, the skald, the poet-seer.

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

Writers who want to interfere with adaptations of their work are basically undemocratic. The book still stands as an entity on its own.

We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.

There's a whole form of literature in India which talks about the quest for the perfect man by a woman, where every woman looks for a perfect man but only ends up with half that.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.

The simple point is that literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment.

I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.

If in 100 years I am only known as the man who invented Sherlock Holmes then I will have considered my life a failure.

Books are the liberated spirits of men.

A book is a loaded gun in the house next door...Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?

Except a living man, there is nothing more wonderful than a book.

Reading is an art form, and every man can be an artist.

Some very plausible stuff is being written by women in a way that most men are not doing.

Men must read for amusement as well as for knowledge.

I don't suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his old crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in his prose, and there isn't a hell of a lot he can do about it.

Whatever your Bible translation is, it stands on the shoulders of one man - William Tyndale.

No man can write who is not first a humanitarian

In those happy days when leisure was held to be no sin, men and women wrote journals whose copiousness both delights and dismays us.

No matter what his rank or position may be, the lover of books is the richest and the happiest of the children of men.

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.

All literature up to today is sexist. The Muses never sang to the poets about liberated women. It's the same old chanson from the Bible and Homer through Joyce and Proust.