Quotes About Literature

But some people seem born to bellyache that being alive is not all right. Should they vent this posture in philosophical or literary works, they may do so without anxiety that their efforts will have an excess of admirers.

Meanwhile, in the realm of Something Lower, where books are but numbers in a series, the hacks grind out and the presses print the sf equivalent of Silhouette Romances. The sheer mass of Perry Rhodan lookalikes and fantasy-gaming disguised as books is awesome in much the same way that Niagara Falls is awesome: there is so much of it and it never stops.

For a lot of people, poetry tends to be dull. It's not read much. It takes a special kind of training and a lot of practice to read poetry with pleasure. It's like learning to like asparagus.

To some extent the history of plagiarism is a history of notebooks.

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.

He paused long enough for me to consider how wonderful life could be when it had great literature-style items, such as coincidence and fate and elegant ironies.

A bad book about the love of God remains a bad book.

How many honest words have suffered corruption since Chaucer's days!

The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul

I have furnished myself with a Bible and Testament; and I can say also that I have found them to be much worse books than I had conceived. If I have erred in any thing, in the former part of the Age of Reason, it has been by speaking better of some parts than they deserved.

Reading a novel in which all characters illustrate patience, hard work, chastity, and delayed gratification could be a pretty dull experience.

the sort of books that cost too much unless you got them free.

Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution," the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.

All writers begin as readers, and the ones worth reading continue life as more prolific readers than writers.

It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

When Wilde composed his works he surrounded himself with books. A friend remembered him writing a poem 'with a botanical work in front of him from which he . . . [selected] the names of flowers most pleasing to the ear to plant in his garden of verse'.5 Aubrey Beardsley's caricature of Wilde, 'Oscar Wilde at Work', shows the author at his desk surrounded by mountains of books.

If he could not read all the volumes he wanted, he could at least 'hold books in his hand'.

Otherwise he was glad we had missed our landing, for he still had three books to read.

She reads a lot of books. Good things, books.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

the whole purport of literature...is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.

All historical novels are science fiction since they are about time travel