Quotes About Literature

I write out of revenge

Jelenka Harvey Harcourt Trade Publishers 15 East 26th Street New York, NY 10010

You had to admire a guy who called his own new book a classic before it was published and anyone else had a chance to read it. Maybe he figured if he didn't do it, nobody would, or maybe he was just trying to give the reviewers a helping hand; I don't know.

Jelenka Harvey Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 215 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10003*

The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.

Apocalyptic literature was created to speak in a powerful way and with a dramatic seriousness that would match the sense of hopelessness and terror that can easily grip a generation in the midst of a profound crisis.

Trinity College (Dublin) library

I have always held the opinion that one of the first duties of a good reader is to summon other readers to the enjoyment of any unknown author of rare quality whom he may discover in his explorations.

Because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye … I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature.

Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there's nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor.

I'm Margarita Staples." She bowed in her harness. "Extreme librarian. Bookaneer.

I just can't get with this idea that literature is a 12-step program. If someone wants to read a book to see good people get rewarded and the bad people get punished, essentially what they want is a fairy tale.

I certainly didn't mind possibly sending the reader to a dictionary once in a while, but I tried not to do it too often.

What if most fiction is, at best, moderately important? What if it is so vague and culturally drivel-some, and so mediated by everything else once the culture industry extrudes it through a writer-shaped nozzle, that our stern declarations about subversive literature are, mostly, kind of adorable?

This first book's for everyone, though almost no one wants it or would know how to read it.

The manager of my line told me, You never put anything down except to be read. Every word ever written is written to be read and if some go unread that's only chance, failure, they're like grubs that die without changing.

Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.

Dismissing fantasy writing because some of it is bad is exactly like saying I'm not reading Jane Eyre because it is a romance and I know romance is crap.

A book holds a house of gold.

After three days without reading, talk becomes flavorless.

It is difficult to express the reality of Ibo society in classical English.

My theory of the uses of fiction is that benificent fiction calls into full life our total range of imaginative faculties and gives us a heightened sense of our personal, social and human reality.

I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.

This is a wonderful, beautiful, and sad book, and I've been recommending it like crazy." —Modern Mrs. Darcy