Quotes About Literature

The books that the world calls immoral books are books that show the world its own shame.

The English novels are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed. But one should not be too severe on them. They show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study.

No existen libros morales o inmorales. Los libros están bien o mal escritos. Eso es todo.

As pessoas comuns costumavam esperar para que a vida lhes exibisse os próprios segredos; para a minoria, porém, para os eleitos, os mistérios da vida eram revelados antes mesmo que o véu fosse afastado, efeito, muitas vezes, da arte, especialmente da literatura, que lida, direto, com as paixões e o intelecto.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium

I'm too fond of reading books to care to write them.

Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure.

One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book.

Si yo hubiera leído todo esto en un libro, Henry, creo que me hubiera echado a llorar. Sin embargo, ahora que me ha ocurrido a mi realmente, parece demasiado asombroso para derramar lágrimas.

A book is either nicely written or it's badly written. That's it.

Más de la mitad de la cultura moderna depende de lo que no debería leerse

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal. But there is no literary public in England for anything except newspapers, primers, and encyclopaedias. Of all people in the world the English have the least sense of the beauty of literature.

A raznochinets needs no memory—it is enough for him to tell of the books he has read, and his biography is done.

Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?

Only in Russia poetry is respected--it gets people killed.

the gods are created by poets --Ovid

Forgive my asking you to use your mind. It is a thing which no novelist should expect of his reader...

He was more like something out of Dickens than anything human.

The unpleasant, acrid smell of burnt poetry.

So!' he said, at length, and it came as a complete surprise to me that fellows ever really do say 'So!'. I had always thought it was just a thing you read in books.

Hol a saját (irodalmi) múltunk tudatos számbavétele? Egy nyugati könyvesboltban tényleg sírva lehet fakadni: Goethe elölrÅ'l, Goethe hátulról, férfival, kisgyerekkel, kecskével, hajnalban, Schillerrel, Thomas Mann-nal, futólag Kleisttel. Ahogy egy kultúra birtokba veszi önmagát...

I suppose half the time Shakespeare just shoved down anything that came into his head.

A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start. (Interview, The Paris Review , Issue 64, Winter 1975)

This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if he do but search diligently, find the literature suited to his mental powers.