Quotes About Literature

Anne really liked chatting and gossiping. That's the same with me. Then I like reading and writing.

It is not merely enough to love literature if one wishes to spend one's life as a writer. It is a dangerous undertaking on the most primitive level. For, it seems to me, the act of writing with serious intent involves enormous personal risk. It entails the ongoing courage for self-discovery. It means one will walk forever on the tightrope, with each new step presenting the possiblity of learning a truth about oneself that is too terrible to bear.

Hervey was not praising the city but suggesting that things like adultery and bad mothering existed in the white downtown aristocratic neighborhoods, and not just among the poor blacks who inhabited Heyward's novels Mamba's Daughters and Porgy.

The Anxiety of Influence

I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.

We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.

What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.

How to read "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.

Such a reader does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence.

As an addict who will read anything, I obeyed, but I am not saved, and return to tell you neither what to read nor how to read it, only what I have read and think worthy of rereading, which may be the only pragmatic test for the canonical.

The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers.

Rereading old books is the highest form of literary pleasure and instructs you in what is deepest in your own yearnings. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends. Imaginative literature is otherness and as such, alleviates loneliness.

Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.

Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.

People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves.

General literature without the humbug," was the New Yorker's original mission.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

What waits me on the shelves? I cannot guess, But feel the sure foreboding; there will cry A voice of human laughter and distress, A word that no one needs as much as I.

Is Moby Dick the whale or the man?

Allegheny County, Pennsylvania

In the English language, the word "sadism" only goes back a hundred years or so. (It wasn't until 1897 that it first appeared in print, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.) In that sense, "sadism" is like "serial killer": a modern expression for an age-old phenomenon.

I never expected any sort of success with 'Mockingbird'... I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement.