Quotes About Literature

And when Deirdre Bair went to interview Beckett for the biography the first thing he said was, 'So you've come to demonstrate that it was all, after all, autobiographical.

All writing is a sin against speechlessness,' Beckett had said. He would have stopped, I thought, if he could.

a novelist's work is often a strategy (I don't mean the author need be aware of this) for dealing with some personal dilemma. Not just that the dilemma is "worked out" in the narrative, as critics often tell us, but that the acts of writing and publishing and positioning oneself in the world of literature are all part of an attempt to find a solution, however provisional, to some deep personal unease.

But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present.

Glory, for the translator, is borrowed glory. There is no way around this. Translators are celebrated when they translate celebrated books.

people want to establish a canon, because people want to imagine that there are great writers and lesser writers and they want the mythology, they want the narrative for themselves. And it's embarrassing.

But now suddenly it occurs to me that by far the main protagonist of twentieth-century literature must be the chattering mind, which usually means the mind that can't make up its mind, the mind postponing action in indecision and, if we're lucky, poetry.

Much is said about escapism in narrative and fiction. But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present.

The purpose of reading is not to pass some final judgement on the text, but to engage with what it has to offer to me now.

Ah, college, when you could occasionally get a date through the judicious application of English-major bullshit.

Spend 80 percent of your time on books and 20 percent on articles and newspapers. And by books, I don't mean just any book. I mean hardcovers. A paperback is made to be read. A hardcover is made to be studied. There's a huge difference.

That's all any writing could ever be. Words on paper that burn intensely when read and then diminish over time.

Books seem a little old-fashioned, but hey, I can do old-fashioned if it's good.

Here in the realm of books she's self-assured. She has some of the control she doesn't have anywhere else.

I was reading a book... 'the history of glue' - I couldn't put it down.

I liked books - the respite and privacy of them - books about plants and the formation of ice and the business of world wars. Whenever I sank into them I felt free.

Si esto es un hombre y La tregua (Club Círculo de Lectores, 2004), de Primo Levi,

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (5 mentions) Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (4) Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (4) Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (4) The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss (4) The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande (4) Dune by Frank Herbert (3) Influence by Robert Cialdini (3)

The genuine love for reading itself, when cultivated, is a superpower.

Peter Drucker and his book The Effective Executive, as well as Alain de Botton's (page 486) How Proust Can Change Your Life.

That Motel Weekend by James Donner, The Srimad Devi Bhagavatam, and The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.

I believe all audio books should be read and recorded by people from Iceland, because they've got the best accent.

I'd learned early that fatness in a book wasn't a warning sign, but rather a promise that you would be allowed to remain in its world for a longer time.

Fortunately for writers, literary characters don't have unions.