Quotes About Literature

Of course, as the book makes clear, it also owes much to Rear Window and The Daughter of Time, not to mention an article I wrote in 1998, about

Where are you getting your material—Portnoy's Complaint?" "What does an Irish lass named Monaghan know from Portnoy and afikomens? I imagine you reading James Joyce and drinking

Bury Me Deep, Megan Abbott Red Baker, Robert Ward Ghost Story, Peter Straub The Getaway, Jim Thompson The Godfather, Mario Puzo Suggested Viewing Misery (1990) The King of Comedy (1982) A Place in the Sun (1951) I Want to Live! (1958) The Wire, season 2

Francine Prose's Blue Angel, Richard Russo's Straight Man, John Irving's The Water-Method Man. He doesn't

Mitchell Dukore's A Novel Called Heritage.

I love the way you can fall in love with a piece of literature how words alone can get your heart doing that.

Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely?

The first book we fall in love with shapes us every bit as much as the first person we fall in love with...

If we weigh the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great children's books suddenly turn up very high on the list.

This is one of the chief differences between a child's experience of a favorite book and an educated adult's. For the adult, a book may be a work of art, possibly a very great one, but for the child reader, certain books are universes. If we are lucky, we retain some of that capacity to be immersed in a story.

What literature could accomplish by way of moral education was less instruction than an expansion of our capacity for empathy: "it admits us to experiences other than our own.

I read for the language, not the story.

That lost literature which only death reads.

It is indeed possible to be widely read, as I am, and still have black holes in one's knowledge.

I remember how Sebastian and I met in study hall, how the first time I saw him he was reading Pride and Prejudice , and how I thought that was really sexy. Of course, I would come to find later that it was the only book he'd read, like, ever, and the only reason he was reading it was to impress some college girl he'd met at a party the weekend before. That should have been a sign that maybe he and I weren't going to be the best match.

Being an author of banned books is cool, I've decided.

What I find cool about being a banned author is this: I'm writing books that evoke a reaction, books that, if dropped in a lake, go down not with a whimper but a splash.

It turned out that not all of those poems were so boring.

Whether I like it or not, most of my images of what various historical periods feel, smell, or sound like were acquired well before I set foot in any history class. They came from Margaret Mitchell, from Anya Seton, from M.M. Kaye, and a host of other authors, in their crackly plastic library bindings. Whether historians acknowledge it or not, scholarly history's illegitimate cousin, the historical novel, plays a profound role in shaping widely held conceptions of historical realities.

From 1500 to about 1550, not one book concerning Portuguese discoveries was published

Allâh as the Beloved in Sûfî literature, the ma'shûq, is always depicted with female iconography.

More wisdom can be transmitted through a novel than a textbook.

Before publishers' blurbs were invented, authors had to make their reputations by writing.

Nay, it ain't got fleas, and 'tis a girl .