Quotes About Literature

Uvijek se možete pouzdati u ubojicu da ?e pisati kitnjastim stilom.

In its published form, this book is being read, I assume, in the first years of 2000 A.D. (1935 plus eighty or ninety, live long, my love)...

Vladimir Nabokov

Yatmadan önce okuyabileceÄŸiniz iyi bir kitaba sahip olduÄŸunuzu bilmek zevklerin en büyüÄŸüdür.

Yo pienso que en esto radica el sentido de la creación literaria: en la descripción de objetos ordinarios tal y como quedarán reflejados en los espejos amables de los tiempos futuros; en encontrar en los objetos que nos rodean la ternura fragante que sólo la posteridad podrá discernir y apreciar en los lejanos tiempos venideros en los que cada minucia de nuestra aburrida vida cotidiana se convertirá en algo exquisito y festivo por derecho propio

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash. Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), Russian-born U.S. novelist, poet. Interview in Writers at Work(Fourth Series, ed. by George Plimpton, 1976).

repeat however for the benefit of those who like books to provide them with "real people" and "real crime" and a "message" (that horror of horrors borrowed from the jargon of quack reformers) that Dead Souls will get them nowhere.

Najdraži san jednog autora jeste da pretvori ?itaoca u gledaoca.

Aquello que se escribió con esfuerzo se lee con facilidad

Russia - the country of Tolstoy, Stanislavski, Raskolnikov, and other great and good men.

My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses

non di rado la vita imita i romanzieri francesi.

Oh, he was quite a scholar, Mr. Taxovich.

Then Van and Ada met in the passage, and would have kissed at some earlier stage of the Novel's Evolution in the History of Literature.

Vladimir Nabokov

He was an amateur of sex lore

Two interesting characteristics distinguished Leonard Blorenge, Chairman of French Literature and Language; he disliked Literature and he had no French.

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping , laughing... I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable.

I may, if I am lucky, tap the deep pathos that pertains to all authentic art because of the breach between its eternal values and the sufferings of a muddled world -- this world, indeed, can hardly be blamed for regarding literature as a luxury or a toy unless it can be used as an up-to-date guidebook.

The true measure of genius is in what measure the world he has created is his own, one that has not been here before him (at least, here, in literature) and, even more important, how plausible he has succeeded in making it.

When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation.

When you read Turgenev, you know you are reading Turgenev. When you read Tolstoy, you read just because you cannot stop.

A paper of mine entitled The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey was chuckled over by the six or seven scholars who read it.

Tolstoy's prose keeps pace with our pulses, his characters seem to move with the same swing as the people passing under our window while we sit reading his book.