Quotes About Literature

I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets.

Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles; and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.

I was celibate until the age of 21. I stayed in my bedroom reading Camus and Nietzsche

There were books everywhere in my house. Books were very present. I just loved books. I never understood reading as anything but a pleasurable activity from a very young age.

In a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected.

What lasts is what is written. We look to literature to find the essence of an age.

There never was an age in which so many people were able to write badly.

My advanced age has taught me the resignation of being Borges.

I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.

National literature does not mean much these days; now is the age of world literature, and every one must contribute to hasten thearrival of that age.

I had this desire to see the world. I couldn't see any of it, but I saw it in my imagination, and that's why I always read books, and I could go to Mars or Middle Earth or the Hyborian age.

Maybe it is something to do with age, but I have become fonder of poetry than of prose.

Literature is so common a luxury that the age has grown fastidious.

Knowing few children of my age with whom to compare notes, I envied the children of literature to whom interesting things were always happening.

Books are a guide in youth, and an entertainment for age.

My view of an excellent novel was probably set in the golden age of fiction in the 19th century: narrative, character and voice are of equal importance.

Virgil and Horace [were] the severest writers of the severest age.

If the men of wit and genius would resolve never to complain in their works of critics and detractors, the next age would not know that they ever had any.

I think it is a quest of literature throughout the ages to describe the human condition.

Say, Britain, could you ever boast, Three poets in an age at most? Our chilling climate hardly bears A sprig of bays in fifty years.

I have a feeling that books are a lot like people - they change as you age, so that some books that you hated in high school will strike you with the force of a revelation when you're older.

If Shakespeare had lived in our age, he would have been sued for writing Romeo And Juliet, because as everybody knows, he plagiarized that from an Italian play.

In America, people of a certain age ask, 'Where were you when Kennedy was shot?' In my house you were more likely to be asked, 'Where were you when you first read 'The Catcher In The Rye?

One of the things I enjoy most is to be left alone with a book.