Quotes About Literature

Fiction is no longer the dominant storytelling device of our time. In the 19th century it worked great, and fiction was the king, but it's not the king any more.

There is commerciality in storytelling, even in a film or a piece of literature. These things exist. That's why stories came to be: to hold attention and, while you're not looking, you'll get hopefully some nutritional value that the author has been working up. That's narrative; that's passing stuff down.

Shakespeare is repeated around the world in different languages, just because it's good storytelling.

I think there is a real thing going on where writers are feeling more liberated to write with a big canvas because of a demonstrable, continued appetite for long-form storytelling.

Robert Bolt's storytelling is the kind that I grew up with and aspired to.

I remember how as I kid I would love stories of every kind - whether they were narrated in school or what I read in books. Storytelling would always appeal to me, I would take part in poetry reciting, dramatics, choreography and debates. There was this fascination for performance, which finally culminated in a professional sphere.

I'm an old-fashioned English lit. man. Straight down the line - it's George Eliot, it's Dickens, it's Dr. Johnson, it's Jane Austen.

A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.

All literature has this moral strain, but in Russian literature, it's particularly sharp.

If I were planning to be stranded on a desert island, I wouldn't take Freud's books with me, because I've already read them all.

I don't have a fondness for movies, which leaves me stranded when it comes to cocktail party chat, but I prefer language and books.

For every Book of Job, there's a Book of Leviticus, featuring some of the most boring prose ever written. But if you were stranded on a desert island, what book would better reward long study? And has there ever been a more beautiful distillation of existential philosophy than the Book of Ecclesiastes?

Since it is impossible to know what's really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary.

I read daft history books. Sometimes the books I read are a bit crackers or strange.

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

There's something very strange about Sherlock Holmes, especially if you're an English schoolboy. When you read the stories, they stay with you forever.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' is such a powerful book, and 'Love in the Time of Cholera' is so strangely, brilliantly optimistic.

Strangely, Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries.

Some of the writers I've praised are Sara Paretsky, Val McDermid, Elisabeth George and Minette Walters. Strangely enough, almost all are women.

'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' had a formative effect on me. I think it's one of those works that if you encounter it very early you're doubly enchanted by the beauty of the language and the strangeness of the vision. It stays with you.

Historically, science-fiction and fantasy literature is no stranger to controversy, but it has learned how to adapt and endure.

I got my first whiff of what big-time adult literature was all about when I was in 8th grade. I got it from Mark Linn-Baker. You know - the guy from 'Perfect Strangers.'

How can I impress strangers with the gem-like flame of my literary passion if it's a digital slate I'm carrying around, trying not to get it all thumbprinty?

What I'm suggesting then is that much of our response to novels may have to do with the kind of "system" or "conversation" we grew up in and within which we had to find a position and establish an identity.