Quotes About Literature

I shall sprinkle pale pencil marks through it pointing out the best passages to some book lover yet unborn.

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.

Mis amigos son muy peculiares...Leen todos los bestsellers que caen en sus manos. Pero luego JAMÁS releen nada, con lo que al cabo de un año no recuerdan ni una palabra de lo que han leido.

Tienes el Viaje a América de De Tocqueville? Alguien tomó prestado el mío, y no me lo ha devuelto. ¿Por qué será que personas a las que jamás se les pasaría por la imaginación robar nada encuentran perfectamente lícito robar libros?

Según entienden ellos la cosa, compras un libro, lo lees, lo colocas en la estantería y jamás vuelves a abrirlo en toda tu vida, ¡PERO NUNCA LO TIRAS! ¡JAMÁS DE LOS JAMASES SI ESTÁ ENCUADERNADO EN TAPA DURA! Pero… ¿por qué no? Personalmente creo que no hay nada menos sacrosanto que un mal libro e incluso un libro mediocre.

Por qué será que personas a las que jamás se les pasaría por la imaginación robar nada encuentran perfectamente lícito robar libros?

Envíeme poetas que sepan hablar del amor sin gimotear... Wyatt o Johnson o alguien por el estilo: lo dejo a su criterio. Pero que sea una edición linda y preferiblemente de pequeño formato, para poder metérmelo en los bolsillos de los pantalones y llevármelo a Central Park.

Si vuestros libros costaran lo que valen, yo no podría permitirme comprarlos.

You must take a year off, one of these days, before you're old and tired and weighed down by responsibility. Go away somewhere, and read. Read all the important books. Educate yourself, then you'll see the world in a different way.

Life is seen as an ongoing war between art and philistinism - and although the philistines may win some of the battles, it is literature that always wins the war.

I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not have it any more; it was at that moment I became an author." [As quoted in the author biography on Mankell's official website .]

il me faisait découvrir des auteurs qui savaient mettre tout plein de mots qui coupaient dans mon ventre, et alors ça faisait du bien de saigner un peu.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

Double standards are inspiration to men of letters, but they are apt to be fatal to politicians.

Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought.

As an English production it does not rank high. It might get by at Princeton but certainly not at Harvard.

Namby Pamby's little rhymes,Little jingle, little chimes.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

L'anecdote, cette moisissure qui se forme sur tous les livres.

The republic of letters.

We are as liable to be corrupted by books as we are by companions.

There had been observed in this country certain streams of influence which were causing a marked deterioration in our literature, amusements, and social conduct; business was departing from its old-time substantial soundness; a general letting down of standards was felt everywhere.

The present volume is the result of a taste for collecting poetical quotations, which beset me in the days of my nonage, now more than half a century ago.... I read the poets diligently, and registered, in a portable form, whatever I thought apposite and striking.