Quotes About Literature

Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book.

...the strongest friends of the soul – BOOKS...

As a child she'd kept a copy of Evangeline in her pocket. She'd go down by the riverside and read it until she cried her eyes out... She thought the two words — primeval forest — that's often in that book, were the two most beautiful words in the English language.

Biographical Sketch, In Fugitive Crayons, of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford

I heard someone tried the monkeys-on-typewriters bit trying for the plays of William Shakespeare, but all they got was the collected works of Francis Bacon.

Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.

I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.

I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.

I believe ghost story writing is a dying art.

Hij kwam binnen in de lappenjas van een afkorting N.S.M.A.N.N. (Nederlandse Schrijver van Marokkaanse Afkomst met Nederlandse Nationaliteit), maar ging weer weg, na een goede rui, een verlies van overbodige veren, als auteur. Hij is stukken magerder geworden, maar gelukkiger. Noem hem voortaan simpelweg auteur.

The Book does not play James Joyce with the Universe.

We insist that this stuff we call science fiction is not SCI-FI. For some in the ghetto of Genre this is axiomatic, a secret truth known only to the genre kids, that there is proper science fiction and then there's that SCI-FI shit.

Personally, I'd like to see the word genre taken out back and shot, a bullet in the back of its head, if it's going to be so overloaded with meanings it's just gibberish skewed to self-serving doublethink.

It's not Sci-Fi, we insist, It's SF. Every time you say that a Venusian Slime Boy dies, you know.

Writers are a combative bunch when it comes to aesthetics, and the generation before GENRE are born into a discourse that's been brewing since Cervantes.

No SF novel ever won the Booker, growls a prowling clansman on his way into the SF Café. The librarian swings a shotgun from inside her longcoat, blasts the bullshit axiom from the air. Screw the Booker, she thinks. She'd rather have a hookah.

So, fuck 'em, we say. Fuck the mundane of Mainstream, the elitists of Literature. We're GENRE FICTION and proud of it, proud to wear that brand painted on the backs of our biker's jackets.

A trebuit sa ma multumesc cu a mi se spune Erra, caci atunci cand zeul limbii le-a dat francezilor alfabetul, litera h a ramas incuiata in biblioteca, iar francezii sufera de pe urma acestei pierderi si azi. Pentru ei, heroian e eroina, iar hotelul e otel.

The book of the moment often has immense vogue, while the book of the age, which comes in its company from the press, lies unnoticed; but the great book has its revenge. It lives to see its contemporary pushed up shelf by shelf until it finds its final resting-place in the garret or the auction room.

The fairy tale belongs to the child and ought always to be within his reach, not only because it is his special literary form and his nature craves it, but because it is one of the most vital of the textbooks offered to him in the school of life. In ultimate importance it outranks the arithmetic, the grammar, the geography, the manuals of science; for without the aid of the imagination none of these books is really comprehensible.

The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is reread him at thirty-eight.

Latin texts and "tried on" various nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, inventing new ones along the way; in the process he would have acquired his vocabulary of some 25,000 words, more than twice the size of the one possessed by John Milton.

Tylko literatura mo?e uprzytomni? ?wiatu jego nienormalno??. Nie historia... tylko literatura.

He lik'd those literary cooks Who skim the cream of others' books; And ruin half an author's graces, By plucking bon-mots from their places...