Quotes About Literature

The national experience is seen as both purposeful and generally progressive. The "system," though not without flaws, works. Lingering flaws will ultimately be diminished. Unarguably, this presumption is the conceptual centerpiece of that vast body of writing known as the literature of American history.

just want to read more books and be a knowledgeable female.

By reading holy literature as if it were a dream, we gain access to a primary mode of our collective unconscious.

To be scientifically illiterate is to remain essentially uncultured. And the chief virtue of a cultural activity--be it art, music, literature, or science--is the way it enriches our lives.

Indeed, an entire generation became acquainted with the stone and one of its supposed possessors, the medieval Parisian notary Nicolas Flamel, by means of the first of J. K. Rowling's wildly successful books: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. (Regrettably, American publishers corrupted the substance's ancient name into the meaningless "Sorcerer's Stone.

I have therefore focused, in the main narrative, on only the best of the stories and on those eleven novels-Eye in the Sky (1957), Time Out of Joint (1959), Confessions of a Crap Artist (w. 1959, p. 1975), The Man in the High Castle (1962), Martian Time-Slip (1964), The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Ubik (1969), Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974), A Scanner Darkly (1977), Valis (1981), and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)-that

My own experiences in dealing with "Hollywood" types is that most are pathological liars, ignorant in the ways of literature and art, lacking in common sense, and incredibly arrogant. They will make empty promises, waste a writer's time, screw in moronic ways with his material, and generally distract a writer from accomplishing anything worthwhile.

As you see, I bear some resentment and some scars from the years of anti-genre bigotry. My own fiction, which moves freely around among realism, magical realism, science fiction, fantasy of various kinds, historical fiction, young adult fiction, parable, and other subgenres, to the point where much of it is ungenrifiable, all got shoved into the Sci Fi wastebasket or labeled as kiddilit--subliterature.

Realism is a very sophisticated form of literature, a very grown-up one. And that may be its weakness. But fantasy seems to be eternal and omnipresent and always attractive to kids.

I don't think science fiction is a very good name for it, but it's the name that we've got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own. But where I can get prickly and combative is if I'm just called a sci-fi writer. I'm not. I'm a novelist and poet. Don't shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don't fit, because I'm all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.

Ah, genre. A word only a Frenchman could love.

There was one person who greatly and directly benefited my career--my agent Virginia Kidd. From 1968 to the late nineties she represented all my work, in every field except poetry. I could send her an utterly indescribable story, and she'd sell it to Playboy or the Harvard Law Review or Weird Tales or The New Yorker--she knew where to take it. She never told me what to write or not write, she never told me, That won't sell, and she never meddled with my prose.

It is difficult to be funny and great at the same time. Aristophanes and Moliere and Mark Twain must sit below Aristotle and Bossuet and Emerson.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

The Victorians needed parody. Without it their literature would have been a rank and weedy growth, over-watered with tears.

If we wish to unfold the mind in our children we do not leave them to their own uncultivated taste in all these things, but we try to help them to train that taste, whether it be in art, in music or in literature.

It has been the sad experience of many that much of the best and the most beautiful is lost to those whose mental food consists exclusively of the sensational paper or the cheap novel, or of that frothy mass of waste material which is thrown up like scum upon the molten metal of life--novelettes, serials, and fragments of a type which neither teach the ignorant, nor strengthen the weak, nor develop the immature.

A self without a shelf remains cryptic; a home without books naked.

Correction of Earlier Entry: 8/01/12 We read over the shoulders of giants; books place us in dialogue not just with an author but with other readers.

Any writer takes inspiration from what they read and watch, and over their career works on forming their own voice. I think it was probably Stephen King who made me want to become a writer.

Should novels generally be 600 pages? No, they should not. Half of writing, maybe 3/4 of writing, is editing. This seems to be a thing that has not gotten through to them. It's my impression that you could get rid of half of most of these books. These people are not good enough to be this long, but they're apparently also not good enough to be shorter.

The second I learned to read in first grade, when I was 5, I preferred it to life. And I still do.

People who are well-known, famous people, I think, make very poor characters for fiction. They make good characters for gossip columns. But not for fiction.

The ghosts of Rilke and Wordsworth--along with the 300+ MFA programs, which now seem to employ all Living Poets--have misled the American public egregiously into thinking that poets are morally pure and/or useless.