Quotes About Literature

The novelist might be greater possible help to us if they painted life as it is, and human feelings in their true proportion and relation, but for the most part they have been and are altogether noxious.

It's a curious thing, this thing we call civilization...we think it is an affair of epochs, and nations. It's really an affair of individuals. One brother will be civilized and the other a barbarian...All civilization comes through literature now, especially in our country. A Greek got his civilization by talking and looking, and in some measure a Parisian may still do it. But we, who live remote from history and monuments, we must read or we must barbarise.

She liked the words; they satisfied her famine for phrases.

It's the whole country that makes or breaks a thing like this. New York has very little to do with it. Now if it were a play, it would be different. New York does make or break a play; but it doesn't make or break a book; it doesn't make or break a magazine. The great mass of the readers are outside of New York and the rural districts are what we have got to go for. They don't read much in New York; they write and talk about what they've written. Don't you worry.

Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books - even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.

We ought to recollect ... that a book consists, like man, from whom it draws its lineage, of a body and a soul.

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.

Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary. (on Ernest Hemingway

I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period.

how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

No man can write who is not first a humanitarian

Read, read, read.

Literature has the same impact as a match lit in the middle of a field in the middle of the night. The match illuminates relatively little, but it enables us to see how much darkness surrounds it.

It's not four days ago I find a bastard squatting here, asking me if I read books. Like he would jump me with a book or something. Take me for a ride with the telephone directory.

Poate c? au avut dreptate când au pus dragostea în c?rÈ›i, se prea poate ca ea s? nu poat? exista în alt? parte.

Perhaps love cannot live anywhere but books.

Lo que hace la literatura es lo mismo que una cerilla en medio de un campo en mitad de la noche. Una cerilla no ilumina apenas nada, pero nos permite ver cuánta oscuridad hay a su alrededor.

Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.

Read, read, read. Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

It used to be a gentleman was known by his books; nowadays he is known by the ones he has not returned.