Quotes About Literature

Of all things I liked books best.

One day I was handed a few volumes of new literature unlike anything I had ever read before and so captivating as to make me utterly forget my hopeless state. They were the earlier works of Mark Twain and to them might have been due the miraculous recovery which followed. Twenty-five years later, when I met Mr. Clemens and we formed a friendship between us, I told him of the experience and was amazed to see that great man of laughter burst into tears.

Of all things I liked books the best.

I started with reading Chomsky and slowly became very interested in anything that had to do with Israel/Palestine. Reading Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, John Berger, Tanya Reinhart, Ilan Pappé, Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Kurt Vonnegut, Arundhati Roy, Naomi Klein . . . all became part of my daily routine.

When you read a book as a child, it becomes a part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your whole life does.

From the essay Twenty-five Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again 1. Journalists sometimes make things up. 2. Journalists sometimes get things wrong. 3. Almost all books that are published as memoirs were initially written as novels, and then the agent/editor said, This might work better as a memoir. 6. Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.

So many of the conscious and unconscious ways men and women treat each other have to do with romantic and sexual fantasies that are deeply ingrained not just in society but in literature.The women's movement may manage to clean up the mess in society, but I don't know if it can clean up the mess in our minds.

Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.

But mostly I wrote letters of gratitude: the state of rapture I experience when I read a wonderful book is one of the main reasons I read, but it doesn't happen every time or even every other time, and when it does happen, I'm truly beside myself.

I want to talk to her. I want to have lunch with her. I want her to give me a book she just read and loved. She is my phantom limb, and I can't believe I'm here without her.

Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on.

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, the extraordinary novel that changed my life and the lives of so many other young women in the 1960s. I have the paperback copy I read at the time, and it's dog-eared, epiphany after epiphany marked so that I could easily refer back to them. Does anyone read The Golden Notebook nowadays? I

Eventually, I'll have to start breathing the air in today's New York again, but on the other hand, perhaps I won't have to. I'll find another book I love and disappear into it. Wish me luck.

On it I read most of Anthony Trollope and all of Edith Wharton, both of whom are dead and can't be written to. Too bad; I'd like to tell them their books are as contemporary as they were when they were written.

Or, as E. L. Doctorow once wrote, far more succinctly "I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction; there is only narrative.

Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real.

Here's a strange thing: Whenever I read a book I love, I start to remember all the other books that have sent me into rapture, and I can remember where I was living and the couch I was sitting on when I read them.

If I don't have twenty or thirty books right here, waiting to be read, I start jonesing. That's my compulsion.

You can't write well what you don't read for pleasure. If it doesn't entertain you, it's not going to entertain anyone else.

You can never read too many books, any kind.

I get pretty opinionated about books.

Popular fiction's a strong and viable force in literature. That's why it's popular.

I don't think you can write - at least not well - if you don't love stories, love the written word.

Tu as vraiment fait regarder Clueless à ta classe de littérature anglaise pour illustrer l'actualité d'Emma de Jane Austen?