Quotes About Literature

I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.

Lord of the Rings is a good thing for us because it opened the door for the genre in general. Le Guin's stories are very different from Lord of the Rings.

I loved reading when I was young. I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn't have access to previously.

I get invited to many more literary festivals than I used to because I'm associated with 'Slumdog Millionaire,' the brand. Many more doors have opened up for me as a result of the global success of the film, although I believe that I'm the same person that existed before it.

'Fifty Shades' opened the door and made it easier to write about any issue that's controversial. It has helped other authors talk honestly.

Increasingly, I find myself drawn to classic forms - to Euripides, Shakespeare and grand opera.

Poetry is all I write, whether for books or readings or for the National Theatre or for the opera house and concert hall or even for TV.

In the traditional academic literature, secrecy is thought of as a set of bureaucratic operations - hiding files and hiding information, that sort of thing.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.  Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!

love is not fashionable any more, the poets have killed it. 

I have been right, Basil, haven't I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare's plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.

I hope it did not end happily? I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.

Nowadays, people read too many books to appreciate any.

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

If they know nothing of death, it is because they know little of life, for the secrets of life and death belong to those, and those only, whom the sequence of time affects, and who possess not merely the present but the future, and can rise or fall from a past of glory or of shame. Movement, that problem of the visible arts, can be truly realised by Literature alone. It is Literature that shows us the body in its swiftness and the soul in its unrest.

Do you really keep a diary? I'd give anything to look at it. May I? Oh, no. You see, it is simply a very young girl's record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy.

A dream of form in days of thought'--who is it who says that? I forget; but it is what Dorian Gray has been to me.

In literature mere egotism is delightful.

Si no podéis disfrutar leyendo un libro repetidas veces, de nada sirve leerlo ni una sola vez.

The unread is always better than the unreadable.

The pen is mightier than the paving-stone

I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.

To tell people what to read is, as a rule, either useless or harmful; for the appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not of teaching; to Parnassus there is no primer and nothing that one can learn is ever worth learning.