Quotes About Literature

In the 1600s," he said, talking faster now, "English was one language the Vatican had not yet embraced. They dealt in Italian, Latin, German, even Spanish and French, but English was totally foreign inside the Vatican. They considered English a polluted, free-thinkers' language for profane men like Chaucer and Shakespeare.

Mr. Langdon, I did not ask if you believe what man says about God. I asked if you believed in God. There is a difference. Holy scripture is stories . . . legends and history of man's quest to understand his own need for meaning. I am not asking you to pass judgment on literature. I am asking if you believe in God. When you lie out under the stars, do you sense the divine? Do you feel in your gut that you are staring up at the work of God's hand?

bibliophile

It was the great Russian author Chekhov who wrote, "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.

I know the fucking Bible, and there ain't no fucking Book of Leviathan.

And then Robinson Crusoe stripped naked, swam out to his ship, filled his pockets with biscuits, and swam back to shore.... What? I said, hefting my pack and frowning at the child. Nothing, she said, getting to her feet. Just an old preHegira book that Uncle Martin used to read to me. He used to say that proofreaders have always been incompetent assholes-even 1400 years ago.

takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature

In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes. Francis

You said seventy million were planned," I said. "Yeah, well, we changed our minds after Transline's resident AI read it." I slumped lower in the flowfoam. "Even the AI hated it?" "The AI loved it," said Tyrena. "That's when we knew for sure that people were going to hate it.

Marmon Hamlit on "AllNet Now!" issued the final deathblow: "Oh, the poetry thing from Whathisname—couldn't read it. Didn't try."    Tyrena

and nothing smells quite as wonderful as old books.

Henry James hated epilogues and refused to use them in his fiction. He said that life granted us no "epilogues", so why should art or literature?

It isn't hard being a hack writer. Between Dying Earth II and Dying Earth IX, six standard years had passed relatively painlessly. My research was meager, my plots formulaic, my characters cardboard, my prose preliterate, and my free time was my own.

nothing smells quite as wonderful as old books.

He wished he were home in Charleston, listening to the Dave Brubeck Quartet on the stereo and reading Bruce Catton.

Reading had always been another world for him. Not an escape, since he rarely sought escape ... writers had to confront the world if they were going to observe it accurately ... but another world nonetheless. One filled with powerful voices relaying even more powerful thoughts.

I can tell you that the writing of a book, no matter how deeply, profoundly personal-if it is literature, if you have attended to the formidable task of illumination the human heart in conflict with itself-will do the opposite of expose you. It will connect you. With others. With the world around you. With yourself.

While in Aspen, I was on a panel one evening with Andre Dubus III, who spoke of what happens when a memoir devolves into self-pity: "Wah, wah, wah. Should we call the wambulance?

Reading is an exercise in empathy. To read is to enter another world in a way different from any other art form.

very bad indeed. Defoe never acquired a really good style, and can in no true sense be called a master of the English tongue. Nature had gifted Defoe with untiring energy, a keen taste for public affairs

Strange to say, the English people were so pleased with this humorous sketch of themselves, that they bought eighty thousand copies of the work. Not often is a truth teller so rewarded.

Captain Ayers reported that lightning struck his house first, and then the tornado wrecked it. Since the wind blew all of his books, papers, and clothing away, the Captain "consoled himself with the thought that some poor stranger could enjoy a clean shirt and respectable literature.

It is often said that reading is a gift, but to my mind that is an insufficient description, for the size of the gift of reading is so vast that it is difficult to see what is outside its wrapping.

The first literary work in prose was history. And we call Herodotus (c.480–c.425 B.C.) the Father of History because his is the earliest surviving work in Greek prose that aimed to give literary form to an extended narrative of the past. The Greek historie means "inquiry" or the search for truth. Herodotus might also perhaps be called the Father of Prose, for until his time verse was still the normal vehicle for narratives of great events and heroes of the past.