Quotes About Literature

I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than that of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.

I deserve neither such praise nor such censure," cried Elizabeth; "I am not a great reader, and I have pleasure in many things.

He was evidently a young man of considerable taste in reading

Con ese libro hacía lleva­deras sus horas de ocio y se sentía consolado en las de abatimiento.

I long to have you hear Mr. H.'s opinion of P. and P. His admiring my Elizabeth so much is particularly welcome to me.

I mention these ritual dances, this ritual drama, this bridge between art and life, because it is things like these that I was all my life blindly seeking. A thing has little charm for me unless it has on it the patina of age. Great things in literature, Greek plays for example, I most enjoy when behind their bright splendours I see moving darker and older shapes.

At his house I often met Henry James. I liked to watch that ingenious spider weaving his webs, but to me he had no appeal.

She wishes there were only dead authors. Living ones are beneath her attention.

Leslie Stephen died in 1904. In that year his children retreated to Wales for a period and then travelled in Italy. Vanessa and Virginia went on to Paris, where they met up with Clive Bell. On returning to London, Virginia suffered a severe, suicidal breakdown.

In 1922 Woolf met the writer Vita Sackville-West, who was to join Vanessa Bell and Leonard Woolf as the most significant people in her life.

Covers, so many covers, so many different, delectable pictures, and although, metaphorically speaking, it is the thing I hate most, when it comes to literature I always judge books by their covers. First the cover will catch my eye, then I read the back of the book, and then finally the first page.

I love the English language, playing with words, watching sentences fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle

The place she felt happiest, the place she found her solace and joy, was in the pages of books. She

As far back as I can remember I would escape from my humdrum world by burying myself in books--the one true love of my life when growing up.

Still, it is books that are a key to the wide world; if you can't do anything else, read all that you can.

possibly because of their habit of bringing their reading matter to the dinner table and ignoring any non-bookworms present.

Clichés were only a sin in literature. In life, if they happened to be true, there was no intellectual campaign that would defeat them.

The novel is, above all, an intense experience of prolonged intimacy with another consciousness.

The plays he had liked were the one called Measure for Measure, and another one called Macbeth. They were easy to follow, and what happened in them was kind of like what happened in junior high school.

the novel is, above all, an intense experience of prolonged intimacy with another consciousness. But

It seems clear, though, from the history of novel writing since Dickens's time, that the production of enduring literary art has little or no relationship to market success, except insofar as a publisher can fund the publication of more complex and difficult works with the profits of a steady stream of popular stories. Even the most "loyal" readers grow "disloyal" when the work fails to please them.

What makes a good book? Scholars and critics have been debating that question for decades. I like books that touch my head and my heart at the same time.

If there is a single person at the nexus of fantasy literature, it is Terri Windling -- as editor, as writer, as painter, as muse.

A book? he asked. Yeah, remember before television and computers we used to do this thing called reading?