Quotes About Literature

I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.

I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.

The American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents.

Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off the belief it inspires is what counts.

Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.

Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.

To rehearse imaginary conversations on paper is called literature. To do so out loud is called madness.

The novelist now usurps the chair of the educator, the pulpit of the preacher, the columns of the journalist. Yet his original purpose of entertaining may have been his highest purpose. (introduction to Gladiator, Book League Monthly, 1930)

Words are catch-basins of experience, fingerprints and footprints of the past that the literary detective may scrutinize in order to sleuth out the history of human consciousness.

Although some people think I am a romantic novelist I have always thought of myself as a rather gritty radical historian.

Ik ben vijftien. Ik heb al honderden boeken gelezen. Ik voel me zwaar van al die boeken, een heerlijke zwaarte. Ik zal mijn leven lang blijven lezen. Ik zal er mijn beroep van maken. Ik word leraar. Een leraar van een bijzondere soort die nooit lesgeeft, die geen leerlingen heeft, maar boeken schrijft over wat hij gelezen heeft, met als doel anderen het verlangen en de behoefte te geven om hem na te volgen.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. — Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library

Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.

A good book isn't written, it's rewritten.

I honestly believe there is absolutely nothing like going to bed with a good book. Or a friend who's read one.

In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.

Every reading is a misreading.

Some kinds of literature demand to be treated respectfully. The obligation is on the reader to live up to them and not so much on them to entertain the reader.

La mia letteratura è emotiva, le mie storie sono emotive; l'unico spazio che ha il testo per durare è quello emozionale. ... Dopo due righe, il lettore deve essere schiavizzato, incapace di liberarsi dalla pagina; deve trovarsi coinvolto fino al parossismo, deve sudare e prendere cazzotti, e ridere, e guaire, e provare estremo godimento. Questa è letteratura.

Criticism demands infinitely more culture than artistic creation.

The title of the work, its place in the collective library, the nature of the person who tells us about it, the atmosphere established in the written or spoken exhange, among many other instances, offer alternatives to the book itself that allow us to talk about ourselves without dwelling upon the work too closely.

in which, along with Montaigne, we raise the question of whether a book you have read and completely forgotten, and which you have even forgotten you have read, is still a book you have read)

There is more than one way not to read, the most radical of which is not to open a book at all. For any given reader, however dedicated he might be, such total abstention necessarily holds true for virtually everything that has been published, and thus in fact this constitutes our primary way of relating to books. We must not forget that even a prodigious reader never has access to more than an infinitesimal fraction of the books that exist.

As may be seen, there is only one sensible piece of advice to give to those who find themselves having to talk to an author about one of his books without having read it: praise it without going into detail. An author does not expect a summary or a rational analysis of his book and would even prefer you not to attempt such a thing. He expects only that, while maintaining the greatest possible degree of ambiguity, you will tell him you like what he wrote.