Quotes About Literature

Ulysses was an elaborate prank, and our supposed intellectual elite continue to fall for it.

What we've done is make the categories of science fiction and fantasy larger, freer, and more inclusive than any other genre of contemporary literature. We have room for everybody, and we are extraordinarily open to genuine experimentation.

That's how we're going to face the end of the world? Reading a book?

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.

When I think of all the harm [the Bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.

You are what you read.

There are two ways to dislike poetry: One is to dislike it; the other is to read Pope.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.

Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable

We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.

I cannot choose one hundred best books because I have only written five

Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.

Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect.

It's absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so.

The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.

A good novel can be a doorstop to despair.

Said, who was born in Mandatory Palestine in 1935, was fond of T. S. Eliot's idea that reality could not be deprived of the other echoes that inhabit the garden.

you cannot open a book without learning something