Quotes About Literature

All of Sicily is a dimension of the imagination.

Il libro è una cosa: lo si può mettere su un tavolo e guardarlo soltanto, ma se lo apri e leggi diventa un mondo." - Leonardo Sciascia

Che resta di una mostra, se non il catalogo?

nulla è più delizioso per uno scrittore del divagare, dell'estravagare: lo scrivere sembra diventare pura, trasparente esistenza - notiamo di quanto profitto siano per la letteratura i miti e le cronache dei gemelli, dei sosia, delle usurpazioni e/o contestazioni di identità, delle sostituzioni notturne e degli sdoppiamenti o dimezzamenti tipo Jekyll-Hyde.

Literature, which I have the honor to serve, is dear to me just because the noblest task it sets before itself is that of wiping out boundaries and distances.

Cordelia was thinking how human beings can invent words, how they can line up their invented words side by side on paper. It was magic.

Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.

Daniel Maclise (whose 1839 oil of Dickens hangs today at the National Portrait Gallery).

as a child, I was an avid reader. And despite reading hundreds of books about straight people, I did not grow up to embrace the heterosexual lifestyle. Similarly, someone who is heterosexual is not going to turn gay from reading a book that features a child being raised by two moms.

Se fosse stata un'amante della lettura, Paola avrebbe senza dubbio trovato conforto nei molti romanzi dedicati all'argomento.

Regretfully, I have decided that if the Saint Saga must remain permanently in print in its entirety, then it can only do so in its original form.

Hemingway seems to be in a funny position. People nowadays can't identify with him closely as a member of their own generation, and he isn't yet historical.

I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.

Tolkienist (n.) Someone who studies the works of J. R. R. Tolkien.

The book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty -- and vice versa.

People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.

When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now -- where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists.

I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had--I don't know what--the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That's what I think writers are for. This is what our function is.

Some scholars have argued that the Persian period was one of the most productive for Hebrew literature. During these two centuries, earlier Israelite literature and traditions were edited and others were written, or so many scholars think; if they are right, this was one of the most prolific times of Jewish literary activity. The difficulty is that this is a very obscure period in the history of the Jews.

I like Shakespeare, but I never know what the hell is going on.

Fanfiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don't do it for money. That's not what it's about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They're fans, but they're not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.

It was a bookstore, and he felt at home in bookstores, and he hadn't had that feeling much lately. He was going to enjoy it. He pushed his way back through the racks of greeting cards and cat calendars, back to where the actual books were, his glasses steaming up and his coat dripping on the thin carpet. It didn't matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.

Personally, I think the "Potter" books have too many adverbs and not enough sex.