Quotes About Literature

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

For the moment, whenever I read, it is normally scripts. You start a book and then you think, 'I should be reading these five scripts.'

Normally when I read, I don't like music playing.

NME is normally associated with indie rock. It ain't something I read as a kid.

The whole book experience was a look into another world, the world of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer.

I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.

It's funny because I think that genre literature can be looked down on by literature literature. And I like that! I like being scorned; I like people looking down their noses at us a little bit... It gives us a little chip on our shoulder.

Literature is always about bygone times. It's always looking back in time with a certain perspective. I look at bygone life which no longer exists, and as I said, I look at it without nostalgia but without anger, either. I look at it with criticism and with compassion. I look at it with curiosity.

When I was a little girl, my first link to the world was as a reader. Sometimes, I feel a nostalgia for those times, for all the emotions I felt as a child - discovering novels, discovering Dickens, Balzac, or Dostoevsky. I wanted to be like those men.

Couldn't imagine any other way of living, outside of books, outside my work. Which doesn't mean I am not interested in other things, of course - I am interested in many things. But the center, the crux, is always literature.

'Religion,' I should note, has a disputed etymology in Latin: some say it's from 'relegere,' meaning 'to reread', while others say it's from religare, meaning 'to connect' or 'link.' Literature is life's fastener.

In some areas I am more noted for reading then I am for cookies!

I remember, even in college, reading Cliffs Notes about a book and thinking to myself, 'Geez, that sounds like a good book. I should probably read it.'

In my stunted career as a scholar, I'd read promissory notes, papal bulls and guidelines for Inquisitorial interrogation. Dante, too. Boccaccio... But after 1400? Nihil.

Dismissals of poetry are nothing new. It's easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it.

I consider science fiction and fantasy my genre. And I've noticed over the years that there doesn't tend to be a lot of lighthearted, comedic stuff.

I have children, and this notion - that there might be a single book that introduces children to literature - terrifies me. But you could do worse than Mary Norton's 'The Borrowers.' I loved it as a kid, and my kids love it, too.

I was saving the name of 'Geisel' for the Great American Novel.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

I hope that 'House of Suns' functions as an independent novel.

When I began to write seriously, 40 years ago now, my chosen form was the novel.

You have a billion people who know 'Tribbles' and only half a million who know my novel 'The Man Who Folded Himself,' which is one of my better-known books.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.