Quotes About Literature

This neglect of lore associated with Crete is reflected in classical Greek art and literature although, paradoxically, its remnants are found only in Attic myths.6

A literary influence is never just a literary influence. It's also an influence in the way you see everything - in the way you feel your life.

Hominem unius libri timeo

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

Books are becoming everything to me. If I had at this moment any choice in life, I would bury myself in one of those immense libraries...and never pass a waking hour without a book before me.

In fact, whenever I read something as complicated as Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and think about his having written it in longhand, I am not merely awed — the thought gives me a headache.

What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!

If anybody would make me the greatest king that ever lived, with palaces and gardens, and fine dinners, and wine and coaches, and beautiful clothes, and hundreds of servants, on condition that I would not read books, I would not be a king. I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading.

Shakespeare is forever coming into our affairs -- putting in his oar, so to speak -- with some pat word or sentence.

The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me--I have no others.

I avoid literature whenever possible, because whenever possible I avoid myself...

Quotation mistakes, inadvertency, expedition, and human lapses, may make not only moles but warts in learned authors...

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

For Mythology is the handmaid of literature and literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.

Always" and "never" are not words that have much meaning in literary study. For one thing, as soon as something seems to always be true, some wise guy will come along and write something to prove that it's not.

Reading...is a full-contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources.

Don't wait for writers to be dead to be read; the living ones can use the money.

Reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer's alone.

If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won't save it.

Well, they may not be civilized, but they are certainly confident--and this confidence is one of the open-handed pleasures of early Irish literature.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

Johnsons are rare; yet, Boswells are perhaps still rarer.

France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams.

Lord Bacon could as easily have created the planets as he could have written Hamlet.