Quotes About Literature

At any rate, where books are concerned, it is notoriously difficult to fix labels of merit in such a way that they do not come off.

Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer!

la novela es como una telaraña ligada muy sutilmente, pero al fin y al cabo ligada a la vida por los cuatro costados.

There they hang in the mind the shapes of the books we have read solidified by the judgments we have passed on them — Robinson Crusoe , Emma , The Return of the Native . Compare the novels with these – even the latest and least of novels has a right to be judged with the best.

que una mujer necesita dinero y una habitación propia para dedicarse a la literatura;

It is ten years since Virginia Woolf published her last volume of collected essays, THE COMMON READER: SECOND SERIES. At the time of her death she was already engaged in getting together essays for a further volume, which she proposed to publish in the autumn of 1941 or the spring Of 1942. She also intended to publish a new book of short stories, including in it some or all of MONDAY OR TUESDAY, which has been long out of print. She left

Poiché una volta che il baco dei libri si è impadronito del sistema umano, lo indebolisce tanto che esso diventa una facile preda per quell'altro flagello, quello che si annida in fondo ai calamai e i cui germi pullulano in cima alla penna. La vittima incomincia a scrivere.

O verde na natureza é uma coisa, o verde na literatura é outra. A natureza e as letras parecem ter uma antipatia visceral; junte as duas, e se estraçalham mutuamente.

Yet even when they were freed from the practical impediments imposed upon their sex, they could not write because they had no tradition to follow. No sentence had been shaped, by long labor, to express the experience of women.

If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today?

No age can ever have been as stridently sex-conscious as our own; those innumerable books by men about women in the British Museum are a proof of it. The Suffrage campaign was no doubt to blame. It must have roused in men an extraordinary desire for self-assertion; it must have made them lay an emphasis upon their own sex and its characteristics which they would not have troubled to think about had they not been challenged

Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.

Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.

A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle...

Vladimir Nabokov

All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.

Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.

To begin with, let us take the following motto...Literature is Love. Now we can continue.

Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.

Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.

I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings.

the good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense–-

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

IN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION: WHAT SCENES ONE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE FILMED Shakespeare in the part of the King's Ghost. The beheading of Louis the Sixteenth, the drums drowning his speech on the scaffold. Herman Melville at breakfast, feeling a sardine to his cat. Poe's wedding. Lewis Carroll's picnics. The Russians leaving Alaska, delighted with the deal. Shot of a seal applauding.