Quotes About Literature

He that studies only men will get the body of knowledge without the soul; and he that studies only books, the soul without the body.

Dead women tell no tales. Sad men write them down.

I used to think that once a writer became a man of letters, if only for a half hour, he was done for. And here I am now, at the very moment of such an odious, though respectable, danger.

A man of letters is often a man with two natures,--one a book nature, the other a human nature. These often clash sadly.

Shakespeare; the only man I'd ever love.

The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn... tired of common sense and civilization.

Men must speak English who can write Sanskrit; they must speak a modern language who write, perchance, an ancient and universal one.

Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.

I delved especially into black writers. Their analogies were relevant to my own experiences, and I understood them better for that.

there are elements of truth in all great fiction

A writer needs to write and a reader wants to read so this creates a symbiotic relationship, at least most of the time.

Her asterisks are daft, postscripts redundant, and prose parenthetical.

A proper collection of quotations is the whole world digested.

Happiness is sharing a bowl of cherries and a book of poetry with a shade tree.

To me, novels are just quotations with a bunch of filler.

When I started in the business, there was a thing called adult fantasy, but nobody quite knew what it was, and most publishers didn't have an adult fantasy list. They had science fiction lists, which they stuck a little bit of fantasy into.

I owe a huge debt to Anaïs Nin, because I fell into her diaries, essays, and collected letters in my Twenties and Thirties like a fish falling into water. She was, in some ways, a deeply flawed human being, and perhaps she makes a strange kind of hero for someone like me, committed to the ethical and spiritual dimensions of my craft as well as to the technical ones, but a hero and strong influence she remains nonetheless. Source: Her blog .

If the Holy Bible was printed as an Ace Double it would be cut down to two 20,000-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as 'Master of Chaos' and the New Testament as 'The Thing With Three Souls.

The oldest written poem was by the Greek, Homer. His poem, The Iliad, tells the story of the siege of Troy, a story of the heroes who fought to the death to get Helen back to her hubby, King Menelaus.

With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.

The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.

Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair.