Quotes About Literature

I had an older brother who was very interested in literature, so I had an early exposure to literature, and and theater. My father sometimes would work in musical comedies.

Read, read, read, read, read. Read everything. You can't work unless you know the world, and outside of living in the world the best way to learn about the world is to read about it.

I'm very feminist in the way I look at the world, and that worldview must somehow be part of my work.

The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.

You're...writing for other writers to an extent-the dead writers whose work you admire, as well as the living writers you like to read.

The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reigns: James I, James II, and the Old Pretender

One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.

A good novel is a conjunction of many factors, the main of which is without a doubt, hard work.

I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.

For me, filmmaking combines everything. That's the reason I've made cinema my life's work. In films, painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.

All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.

Work! labor the asparagus me of life; the one great sacrament of humanity from which all other things flow - security, leisure, joy, art, literature, even divinity itself.

Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature and one of only three now writing whose work makes me truly happy to be a reader.

The books we enjoy as children stay with us forever -- they have a special impact. Paragraph after paragraph and page after page, the author must deliver his or her best work.

When I was growing up, Dr. Seuss was really my favorite. There was something about the lyrical nature and the simplicity of his work that really hit me.

Gene Wolfe has produced a work of art that can satisfy adult appetites and in which even the most fantastical elements register as poetry rather than as penny-whistle whimsy.

The real influence on my work was reality, that of my country and Latin America in general.

As a woman I have felt encouraged and fed by and nurtured by the work of [Jack] Kerouac and others.

In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

My feeling about my own work is, I could be writing 'The Aeneid' and they would still have to call it chick lit or mommy lit or menopausal old hag lit.

When I'm working on a serious and solid book ... I read about a detective novel a day. It's the best legal dope in the world. It makes you feel good until the next morning you can work again.

I hope people are reading my work in the future. I hope I have done more than frightened a couple of generations. I hope I've inspired a few people one way or another.

The only test of work of literature is that it shall please other ages than its own.

When a literary person's exhaustive work is over, the last thing he wishes to do is to talk books.