Quotes About Literature

people who read literary fiction (as opposed to popular fiction or nonfiction) were better able to detect another person's emotions, and the theory proposed was that literary fiction engages the reader in a process of decoding the characters' thoughts and motives in a way that popular fiction and nonfiction, being less complex, do not.

It's exciting to hear them talking about poetry and science and philosophy—about Shakespeare and Milton; Newton and Einstein and Freud; about Plato and Hegel and Kant, and all the other names that echo like great church bells in my mind.

If I coud I woud sit down and reed all the time.

spend most of my free time at the library now, reading and soaking up what I can from books. I'm not concentrating on anything in particular, just reading a lot of fiction now—Dostoevski, Flaubert, Dickens, Hemingway, Faulkner—everything I can get my hands on—feeding a hunger that can't be satisfied.

Dostoevski, Flaubert, Dickens, Hemingway, Faulkner

I spend most of my free time at the library now, reading and soaking up what I can from books. I'm not concentrating on anything in particular, just reading a lot of fiction now—Dostoevski, Flaubert, Dickens, Hemingway, Faulkner—everything I can get my hands on—feeding a hunger that can't be satisfied.

I'm not concentrating on anything in particular, just reading a lot of fiction now - ... - everything I can get my hands on - feeding a hunger that can't be satisfied.

the fact that both of these hostile camps could make use of the same examples to prove diametrically opposed interpretations suggests a truth about how all of us read and interpret literary texts—one that is, possibly, rooted in the mysteries of human nature itself. Where some people see chaos and incoherence, others will find sense and symmetry and wholeness.

Nothing in this world compares to writing and being read.

Man is what he reads.

I think it is good that books still exist, but they do make me sleepy.

I'm not sure that finding a husband at university made me any less of a feminist or an academic. I still soaked up Susan Faludi; I still read Doris Lessing. But I did it at the same time I met someone who I felt was my soulmate.

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that cannot read them.

You only need to look at Jane Austen to see how crossed wires can become a defining aspect of romantic life. Then again, if the course of true love ran more smoothly, it would have a terribly detrimental effect on our cache of love stories.

Writers are people whose words speak louder than their actions.

But picketing - picketing for or against something, and handing out literature - these are conspicuously formal actions. They have to be understood as indirect communication.

If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3,900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print.

The age is materialistic. Verse isn't. I must be with the age, so I am writing prose.

Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of the ages through which they have passed.

Enough if every age produce two or three critics of this esoteric class, with here and there a reader to understand them.

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

Even the nonreligious may exercise aesthetic judgment in matters of religion, and indeed our age has given the unbelieving a sophisticated taste in religious literature.

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.

Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.