Quotes About Literature

novelists only Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jorge Luis Borges have

Braque and James Joyce, they are the incomprehensibles whom anybody can understand

It was Virgil's country and there was a wind that seemed to rise from the fields and descend upon us in a long Virgilian sigh, for the land that has inspired sentiment in the poet ultimately receives its sentiment from him.

keep them warm burn everything except Shakespeare.

first half of the fifteenth century,

Books were her kids.

I was the least impressed with, a woman who thought Henry Miller was a police sitcom from the seventies.

I'd be happy to give special treatment to a dedicated school teacher, or even someone like William Faulkner if he was still alive, because despite the fact that an exegesis of his prose completely eluded me, I had to admit, especially when Jacob held me down and made me say it, that the guy was a kick-ass architect of the ever-elusive sentence.

Had they been living in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Angelica would have been Jane Bennet and Eliza, Eliza.

This is not a real book; not really. A real book tells a story. A real book starts at the beginning and has a middle and an end and I should know. I've read enough of them. So many that one day I woke up as a character in one. I'm there now, trapped between the pages of a book about a girl who drops out of school, reads more than is good for her and ends up in the loony bin.

When I mentioned to a friend I was writing a book about eggs he told me to be sure to mention how in Thomas Hardy's "Jude the Obscure" the young Arabella incubates a sky-blue egg of a song bird in the cleavage of her bosom ... When I checked, I was disappointed to find it wasn't a song thrush egg, but that of a chicken ... The original image in my mind disintegrated like the sound of a vinyl record after the power has been turned off.

When I was growing up, Dr. Seuss was really my favorite. There was something about the lyrical nature and the simplicity of his work that really hit me.

The best tool in a writer's arsenal is a reader's imagination.

If you look at the purported dangers of salt or fat, there is no consensus of support in scientific literature. So I would ask first: 'Is it possible to have an informed government that actually follows the science?' From what I've seen, it's not likely.

It's no secret that in my books I'm trying to make the comic and the serious rub up against each other just as closely and uncomfortably as I can.

Shakespeare's always been sitting on my back, since I began reading. And, certainly, as a writer, he's who I hear all the time. And he's almost indistinguishable now from the English language. I have no sense of what Shakespeare is like. I have no sense of the personality that is Shakespeare. I think, alone among writers, I don't know who he is.

It's no wonder the narcissistic mother will always have a place in literature: she's a freak of nature.

For a century, women have binged on romance novels that encouraged them to associate intimidation with infatuation; it's no wonder that this emotional hangover still lingers.

The most noble criticism is that in which the critic is not the antagonist so much as the rival of the author.

I tell you this: I'm not an outdoorsman. Actually, one of my things is to pick a little corner in Borders or Barnes & Noble and fall back and just read.

Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor.

I write in a noisy, distracting world so the books can be read there.

To map the Governor General's Award is to map both the past and the future of Canadian literature, and to be nominated for my first book is wonderful.

There's nothing quite as exciting or moving as the very finest literary non-fiction.