Quotes About Literature

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) was a prominent American feminist, sociologist, novelist, writer of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction, and a lecturer for social reform.

What Diantha Did was first published in serialised form in Gilman's magazine The Forerunner between late 1909 and October 1910.

And people tended not to bother a woman with a book.

The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, and The Optimist's Daughter, by Eudora Welty.

Books] were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear.

I've long believed literature's greatest superpower is how it makes us feel less alone.

About John Updike's Rabbit Run] The author fails to convince us that his puppets are interesting in themselves, or that their plight has implications that transcend their narrow world.

Houve um tempo em que, se tivesse de optar entre duas cegueiras, escolheria ser cego ao esplendor do mar, às montanhas, ao pôr-do-sol do Rio de Janeiro, para ter olhos de ler o que há de belo, em letras negras sobre fundo branco.

Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.

The publishers and others should quit worrying about losing customers to TV. The guy who can sit through a trio of deodorant commercials to look at Flashgun Casey or swallow a flock of beer and loan-shark spiels in order to watch a couple of fourth-rate club fighters rub noses on the ropes is not losing any time from book reading.

I wasn't satisfied with "Stuart Little" on TV, but I didn't expect to be... It is the fixed purpose of television and motion pictures to scrap the author, sink him without a trace, on the theory that he is incompetent, has never read his own stuff, is not responsible for anything he ever wrote, and wouldn't know what to do about it even if he were.

My own love of books begins long before I start to read them. First of all, I am an incurable book-sniffer; when I open a new book I at once savour its scent, and I have had some odd looks from bookshop assistants in consequence...

...winking all the way as a vent for his superfluous sagacity...

I suggested that he should write out the whole affair from beginning to end, knowing that ink might assist him to ease his mind. When little boys have learned a new bad word they are never happy till they have chalked it up on a door. And this also is Literature.

Most editors are failed writers — but so are most writers.

My prose style at this time was a stomach-twisting blend of the Bible, Carl Sandburg, H.L. Mencken, Jeffrey Farnol, Christopher Morley, Samuel Pepys, and Franklin Pierce Adams imitating Samuel Pepys. I was quite apt to throw in a "bless the mark" at any spot, and to begin a sentence with "Lord" comma.

A well-disposed research librarian is a writer's best friend, as essential as ink.

...a writer is, by trade, a talkative fellow on paper and appreciates an audience.

"Mr. Harte, what books shall I read to acquire a perfect style?" "Oh, lord!" he groaned, swinging around in his chair, "for pity's sake, don't read anything! Just write! Write! Write!"

Authorship is exhibitionism, and readers a species of voyeur.

Whenever the extracts from a living writer begin to multiply fast in the papers, without obvious reason, there is a new book or a new edition coming. The extracts are ground-bait.

You should write and read all day...

"And when once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen." "But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any other way you can." "To be sure... I have seen a litherary gentleman in a sponging house do crack things on the wall, with a bit of burnt stick..."

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.