Quotes About Literature

Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself alone at night, and it is not quick as poetry but rather a gathering web of insinuations which go further than names however shared can go. Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone ...

Initially, 2,000 copies were printed. Today this seems a modest figure, but the market was not huge: as late as the 1790s Edmund Burke estimated the reading public at below 100,000.

Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741), a scurrilous burlesque, written mostly by John Arbuthnot, that poked fun at Grub Street twittishness. He chose this indelicate item because it was a source of interesting words like 'chicanery', 'confidant', 'troglodyte' and 'piazza', and even the distinctly modern-sounding 'skylight'.

The total cost of printing was £1,239. 11s. 6d. In addition to Johnson's £1,575, at least £1,500 was spent on paper—a large, though not freakish, figure, since the purchase of paper was usually reckoned to account for half the cost of publishing a book. Still, this meant the outlay was in the region of £4,500.

On his trip to the Hebrides with Boswell in 1773, he used the word 'depeditation' in reference to the actor Samuel Foote, who had suffered a broken leg. Like a Scrabble player, Boswell challenged this, and Johnson admitted he had made the word up, before adding mischievously 'that he had not made above three or four in his Dictionary'. Horace

The young Johnson was what Coleridge liked to call a 'library cormorant', a rapacious creature nesting among books.

Jane Collier's Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (a spoof conduct book published in 1753)

The answer lies in the Preface, where he explains, 'Obsolete words are admitted, when they are found in authors not obsolete, or when they have any force or beauty that may deserve revival.'ag Significantly, the epigraph to the finished Dictionary is a passage on this very theme from the second of Horace's Epistles; it celebrates the efforts of the prudent critic who weeds out undignified language and rehabilitates forgotten but elegant words.

We owe pandemonium to Milton's Paradise Lost (where it is 'the high Capital of Satan and his Peers'), diplomacy to Edmund Burke, and pessimism to Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Among more recent innovators was the Russian-born Vladimir Nabokov, whose novel Bend Sinister is trophied with delightful oddities like kwazinka ('a slit between the folding parts of a screen') and shchekotiki (which is 'half-tingle, half-tickle').6

Any man with a moderate income can afford to buy more books than he can read in a lifetime.

I'm glad you like adverbs—I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.

Vereker's secret… the general intention of his books: the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the carpet.

I'm glad you like adverbs — I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.

Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.

She is written in a foreign tongue.

Don't underestimate the value of irony—it is extremely valuable.

he read everything he could lay his hands on, yet there are five books to be mentioned specifically, because from childhood they furnished his intellectual nutriment. These were the Bible, Aesop's Fables and Pilgrim's Progress, Burns, and Shakespeare.

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Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world

Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.

Books are both our luxuries and our daily bread.

Books are both our luxuries and our daily bread. -Henry Stevens (Posted on Twitter by @FSG_Books Farrar,Straus&Giroux