Quotes About Literature

I can't help but think that it's an unfortunate custom to name children after people who come to sticky ends. Even if they are fictional characters, it doesn't bode well for the poor things. There are too many Judes and Tesses and Clarissas and Cordelias around. If we must name our children after literary figures then we should search out happy ones, although it's true they are much harder to find.

I myself am usually to be found lying on the bed imitating the dead Chatterton, killing time by reading book after book (the only reliable otherworlds i´ve discovered so far).

You don't see the point of English literature?' 'I don't see the point of studying it. Surely one just reads it?

Martin couldn't imagine a world where there was no time to read.

She had never been without a book for as long as she could remember. An only child never is. Literature had fuelled her childhood fantasies and convinced her that one day she would be the heroine of her own narrative.

The way good inventions are made is to familiarize yourself with those of others. The men who cultivate letters and the arts are all sons of Homer.

I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.

Men of wit, learning and virtue might strike out every offensive or unbecoming passage from plays.

Authors have established it as a kind of rule, that a man ought to be dull sometimes; as the most severe reader makes allowances for many rests and nodding-places in a voluminous writer.

Clarity is the politeness of the man of letters.

Given the books of a man, it is not difficult, I think, to detect therein the personality of the man, and the station in life to which he was born.

There is no book so poor that it would not be a prodigy if wholly made by a single man.

A man who attempts to read all the new productions must do as the flea does,--skip.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man.

If I had read as much as other men I would have known no more than they.

It has been said that to write is to live forever. The man who said that is dead.

Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the firsta dull man writing broken English, the seconda broken man writing dull English.

The more a man writes, the more he can write.

The written word may be man's greatest invention. It allows us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn.

The booksellers are generous liberal-minded men.

Men often discover their affinity to each other by the mutual love they have for a book.

Let every man, if possible, gather some good books under his roof.

No author is a man of genius to his publisher.