Quotes About Literature

I feel very much at home in the early nineteenth century and am not inclined to leave it.

'Ninth House' is my first book for adults.

I read a lot of nineteenth-century French poetry. And Irish poetry from the ninth century on.

Attending a book group is always a salutary experience for a writer. There's no guarantee that the people there will have enjoyed your book, and, as anyone who has taken part in a book group will know, half the fun is in ripping a book you haven't liked to shreds.

I love to read and I love to write. I love to read. You have no idea how many books I have. I love to sing.

I love to read, and I love to write. I love to read. You have no idea how many books I have.

Drama school introduced me to a world I had no idea about. I wasn't brought up in a literary household at all.

The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives.

I have no memory for what happens in what books. I don't know when I might remember a scene, but beats me what book it's in because there are 14 of them now.

There's no point in making a film out of a great book. The book's already great. What's the point?

Frankly I never seriously read my father's books until after he died. Up to then, there had been no point.

Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who bought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest qualities -- their brute persistence.

And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun.

Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time.

Books are, let's face it, better than everything else.

Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town!)

You're not allowed to say anything about books because they're books, and books are, you know, God.

I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I'm certainly not the dumbest. I mean, I've read books like The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Love in the Time of Cholera, and I think I've understood them. They're about girls, right? Just kidding. But I have to say my all-time favorite book is Johnny Cash's autobiography Cash by Johnny Cash.

about organizing books in his home library, and putting a book in the Arts and Lit non-fiction section) I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey.

All I know is that you can get very little from a book that is making you weep with the effort of reading it. You won't remember it, and you'll learn nothing from it, and you'll be less likely to choose a book over Big Brother next time you have a choice.

Zaid's finest moment, however, comes in his second paragraph, when he says that the truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more. That's me! And you, probably! That's us!

I don't mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way--characters saying things people never say, doing jobs that don't fit, the whole works--is simply asking too much of a reader. Something happening in a phony way must beat nothing happening in a phony way every time, right? I mean, you could prove that, mathematically, in an equation, and you can't often apply science to literature.

Ho da poco scoperto che la mia amica Mary, quando finisce un libro, fa passare qualche giorno prima di cominciarne un altro - vuole dare all'ultima lettura un po' più di respiro, prima che venga soffocata dalla prossima. È una cosa sensata, e mi sembra una linea di comportamento assolutamente lodevole. Noi che leggiamo nevroticamente, tuttavia - per scongiurare la noia e il timore dell'ignoranza e della nostra morte imminente - non possiamo permetterci di farlo.

The trouble with influential books is that if you have absorbed the influence without ever reading the original, then it can sometimes be hard to appreciate the magnitude of its achievement.