Quotes About Literature

The French have a different take on photography than Americans do. They consider photography to be absolutely parallel to literature. That often makes for a deeper perception of the work.

How I work is that I write a story I'd like to read. Then you fly to Paris or Sydney and the interviewers talk about the greater significance of your work.

Love can't be a metaphor anymore. If you try to make literature out of it, it doesn't work.

Everything that you read is an influence on everything you write, and you want to draw as many elements into your work as you can.

Nights without work I spend with whisky and books.

I get up at an unholy hour in the morning my work day is completed by the time the sun rises. I have a slightly bad back which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.

From the time I read my first Hemingway work, The Sun Also Rises, as a student at Soldan High School in St. Louis, I was struck with an affliction common to my generation: Hemingway Awe.

I teach literature. That's easy for me. Take someone else's work and talk about it.

If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.

I just happen to like the work. I like preparing for a role. I like reading. I like analyzing. I like literature. I like emotions. I like working with other actors.

The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer's ideas or personality.

Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.

I don't want people running around saying Gwen Brooks's work is intellectual. That makes people think instantly about obscurity. It shouldn't have to mean that, but it often seems to.

Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.

There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression.

Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.

Poe was a student of many things, and among those things he read and referred to in his work was the Bible.

I am trying to write novels for properly clever people, but I also want them to be proper novels that also stick in a person's mind and have an atmosphere about them.

You want all your books to stick around after you've gone.

The good books stick around for a reason. There is a reason that we come back to them and they are so rewarding.

What Bradbury had that most other science-fiction writers didn't have at that time was a love for beautiful language, evocative description, and haunting phrases that would stick with the reader.

We can spend Rs 5,000 for a meal at the Taj and thousands on all kinds of shopping, but we're always stingy about books. We always think of borrowing. Why? Writers can use some support. If you have space and money, you should buy your own books.

I'm very drawn to Eastern Europe, so I like a Hungarian writer who wrote in French called Emil Cioran; he was always good for giving me such a stir.

In the fall of 1963, in Leningrad, in what was then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the young poet Dmitry Bobyshev stole the young poet Joseph Brodsky's girlfriend.