Quotes About Literature

have you read any book from "heinrich boll"?he is my faverit writer . what do u think about his books?

No author is a man of genius to his publisher.

I fell asleep reading a dull book, and I dreamed that I was reading on, so I awoke from sheer boredom.

I once read somewhere that Sean Connery left school at the age of 13 and later went on to read Proust and Finnegans Wake and I keep expecting to meet an enthusiastic school leaver on the train, the type of person who only ever reads something because it is marvellous (and so hated school). Unfortunately the enthusiastic school leavers are all minding their own business.

If you were at school they would not let you read a book like this, they would keep you from reading it by involving you in sport.

Sometimes I rode the Circle Line reading a book on organic chemistry and sometimes I read Leave It to Psmith for the 20th or 21st time and sometimes I watched Jeremy Brett's marvellous grotesque Sherlock Holmes or of course Seven Samurai. I sometimes went out for Tennessee Fried Chicken. Day followed day. A year went by.

I said I liked Amundsen and Scott and I liked King Solomon's Mines and I liked everything by Dumas and I liked The Bad Seed and The Hound of the Baskervilles and I liked The Name of the Rose but the Italian was rather difficult.

I fix myself a hot chocolate because it is a gateway drug to reading.

It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It's like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting "Cathy" and banging your head against a tree.

But I've been reading A Very Easy Death, about Simone de Beauvoir's mother dying of cancer – it's just brilliant. It really helped me.' She

It took me a long time to realise how many of our classic books on animals were by gay writers who wrote of their relationships with animals in lieu of human loves of which they could not speak.

And I found there were myriad definitions of this thing called tragedy that had wormed its way through the history of literature; and the simplest of all was this: that it is the story of a figure who, through some moral flaw or personal failing, falls through force of circumstance to his doom.

he lifted the fat and frightened hawk onto his fist reciting it passages from Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard II, Othello-- 'but tragedy had to be kept out of the voice'-- and all the sonnets he could remember, whistling hymns to it, playing it Gilbert and Sullivan and Italian opera, and deciding, on reflection, that hawks liked Shakespeare best.

Fate is what it was. Yes, fate that the book I had with me was a novel written by my great-grandfather, a text you couldn't read because my great-grandfather had put a permanent ban on any of his works being translated into English, Russian, or French. He was adamant that these three are languages that break all the bones of any work translated into them.

Edith Wharton novels for two Henry James novels, Lucia Berlin's short stories for John Cheever's, Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado for Dany Laferrière's I Am a Japanese Writer, Dubravka UgreÅ¡i?'s Lend Me Your Character for Gogol's How the Two Ivans Quarreled and Other Stories, Maggie Nelson's Jane: A Murder for Capote's In Cold Blood, Lisa Tuttle's The Pillow Friend for The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James.

When the soul is dead and the body is the only concern, there's not much to get excited about...the only thing alive for me now is our literature.

I thought Erica Jong's Fear of Flying was one of the biggest pieces of crap that I've ever read in my life.

In the final analysis, it is not critics who create literary canons, it is other writers who create them .... A writer can have published thirty-seven volumes, but if that writer doesn't interest other writers, they will all molder in the library and nobody will ever want to read them again.

All literature is scarry.

Why should I run all the way down to 17th St. to buy dirty, badly made books whenI can buy clean, beautiful ones from you without leaving the typewriter? From whereI sit,London's a lot closer than 17th Street.

Soy una apasionada de los libros escritos por testigos oculares.

A newspaper man I know, who was stationed in London during the war, says tourists go to England with preconceived notions, so they always find exactly what they go looking for. I told him I'd go looking for the England of English literature, and he said: "Then it's there.

I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest.

Well, if your books cost what they're worth, I couldn't afford them.