Quotes About Literature

My stories are full of facts; they have a beginning and an end. For that reason, they will never... occupy a place in contemporary literature.

The way I was educated, maybe from just inhaling something in the air back then, I grew up believing that E. B. White occupied the apex of essay writing.

My collection of stories is called A River Runs Through It, and they are love stories: stories of my love of craft—of what men and women can do with their hands—and of my love of seeing life turn into literature.

Life every now and then becomes literature [...] long enough to be what we best remember, and often enough so that what we eventually come to mean by life are those moments when life, instead of going sideways, backwards, forward, or nowhere at all, lines out straight, tense and inevitable, with a complication, climax, and, given some luck, a purgation, as if life had been made and not happened.

I won't stay in with married men any more said the wise girl they're too agreeable, it's a little too much like curling up with the good book. You mean a good book Oh, dear, did I say the good book sighed the witch.

Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.

I will now make an apology, although I will do my best not to repeat it. (Good readers do not read fiction, after all, to put up with the author's regrets.)

One's own literary work was the only answer to the war in Vietnam.

Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibits with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like a cat-show, but the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell.

The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.

The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.

I don't see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our society. [p.92]

I soon realized that a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads: the most conscientious student will be continually misconstruing the implications, even the meaning.

Literature keeps presenting the most vicious things to us an entertainment, but what it appeals to is not any pleasure of these things, but the exhilaration of standing apart from them and being able to see them for what they are because they aren't really happening. The more exposed we are to this, the less likely we are to find an unthinking pleasure in cruel or evil things. As the eighteenth century said in a fine mouth-filling phrase, literature refines our sensibilities.

The written word is far more powerful than simply a reminder: it recreates the past in the present, and gives us, not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the summoned-up hallucination.

A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.

Perhaps you'd care for a synonym bun, suggested the duke.

I hate it as one hates sin or pestilence or--the color work in a ten-cent magazine.

La lectura es libertad y el lector, al leer, reinventa aquello mismo que lee; participa así en la creación universal.

Credevo (e credo) che una tradizione poetica non si definisca attraverso il concetto politico di nazionalità ma attraverso la lingua e i rapporti che s'intessono tra gli stili e i loro creatori.

But why, he said with animation, do the English not read their own great literature? Victor laughed triumphantly, and said, Because at school they are made to hate it.

I suspect I do not like kisses in general--perhaps my blood is stirred by poetry alone--but I have no grounds for comparison.

The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book over I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.

It wasn't an alternative to experience, or an escape from it. Not if you did it right. Reading was the only way we could transcend our own experience and deeply engage in that of another's.