Quotes About Literature

One novel known by millions of young Americans that offers an account of tyranny and resistance is J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Be kind to our language: avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.

Shakespeare broke a mold. After about five years of writing, he saw women as women, including the bind they had been put into. No other playwright, writing before Shakespeare or at the same time as Shakespeare, had ever seen women as women.

That great Cham of literature, Samuel Johnson.

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

Civilized nations build libraries; lands that have lost their soul close them down.

the pleasures of literary fiction are the pleasures of orientation; the pleasures of literature are the pleasures of bewilderment.

When the critic has said everything in his power about a literary text, he has still said nothing; for the very existence of literature implies that it cannot be replaced by non-literature

To be published as a "woman of color" makes me squiggle on a pin: I want to be read by white people, and not just white people who are interested in "black" writing. I want even my speaking about color to speak in some universal way.

The Old Testament is my favourite science fantasy reading.

I enjoyed what I read, but since I regarded- and regard- Saunder's work roughly as salable as a Hefty bag filled with hypos, I was too depressed to even write him back. I also suspected that, if I did, I was going to get an extremely loquacious pen pal (and perhaps even increasingly nude photos).

I write short stories when a little idea occurs to me, that I know isn't a part of a novel that will stand by itself and should be concentrated.

Occasionally I write a small piece or the odd lecture in English, and I teach in English, but my fiction is always written in German.

Oddly, the meanings of books are defined for me much more by their beginnings and middles than they are by their endings.

I read The Odyssey all the time. I always get something out of it.

There is no way, absolutely no way, that I would want people to stop reading the 'Odyssey.' But I want them to read it with their eyes open. To notice it and then to think what it says about us.

It doesn't seem to me that anyone has discovered much that's new since the Iliad or the Odyssey.

There's absolutely nothing anyone can say about my mother or myself or my step-father that we haven't heard before. You'd have to be a Dickens or a Nabakov to come up with something really offensive.

I love 'To Kill A Mockingbird' - it seems to offer up new layers every time you read it. I also love Kate Atkinson's 'Behind The Scenes At The Museum' - that's the book that started me writing.

Literature seems to offer lessons in human nature that help us decode the world around us and be better friends.

The one that I've always wanted - and I have Scott Rudin in my way blocking it - is 'Blood Meridian,' which Cormac McCarthy has offered to adapt into a screenplay.

Pu La was like a father figure to people of my generation. I thank him for the characters his literary works offered us. They personify full-fledged human beings and have always given me company.

A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.

I don't know if I officially proofread my father's book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.