Quotes About Literature

Literature interprets the world, but it's also shaped by that world, and we're living through one of the greatest economic and technological transformations since--well, since the early 18th century. The novel won't stay the same: it has always been exquisitely sensitive to newness, hence the name. It's about to renew itself again, into something cheaper, wilder, trashier, more democratic and more deliriously fertile than ever.

Plum guessed it stood to reason that out of all these billions of books at least one of them had to be dragon porn.

All of human literature could just be a user's guide to the multiverse!

Now all I can see is how simple he made everything sound. Reading the Fillory books you would think that all one has to do is behave honorably and bravely and all will be well. What a lesson to teach young children. What a way to prepare them for the rest of their lives.

It didn't matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home. The

That was one thing about books: once you read them they couldn't be unread. But

His room was a maelstrom of books and paper and laundry, as usual,

One must not ask for sincere autobiographies from writers. Fiction was invented precisely to give men the possibility of expressing themselves freely.

The story of a regeneration of convictions - can any story in the entire field of literature be more filled with thrilling and all-absorbing interest?

Selv om det ingen gjester var, var Anna like opptatt med seg selv som ellers og dessuten svært opptatt av å lese - både romaner og alvorlige bøker, slike som var på mote nå. Hun bestilte alle de bøkene som ble rosende omtalt i de utenlandske avisene og tidsskriftene hun mottok, og pløyet dem igjennom med den oppmerksomhet for det man leser som man bare finner hos mennesker i ensomhet.

I've always been interested in gadgets and technology and I've always been a reader.

There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you've read only once can't.

If I couldn't sleep, I could read.

I love having written. Sometimes I love writing. I love to revise. Revising is my favorite part of writing.

It is always understood as an expression of condemnation when anything in Literature or Art is said to be done for effect; and yet to produce an effect is the aim and end of both.

I have always considered The Merry Wives one of the worst plays, if not altogether the worst, that Shakespeare has left us. The wit for the most part is dreary or foolish; the tone is coarse and farcical; and the characters want the fine distinctive touches he so well knew how to give. If some luckless wight had written such a comedy in our time, I should like to see what the critics would say to it?

Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress. It deepens our natural sensibilities, and strengthens by exercise our intellectual capacities. It stores up the accumulated experience of the race, connecting Past and Present into a conscious unity; and with this store it feeds successive generations, to be fed in turn by them.

I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty.... The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have been better not to have read at all.

Of course all children's literature is not fantastic, so all fantastic books need not be children's books. It is still possible, even in an age so ferociously anti-romantic as our own, to write fantastic stories for adults: though you will usually need to have made a name in some more fashionable kind of literature before anyone will publish them.

It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.

Do not suppose, however, that I intend to urge a diet of classics on anybody. I have seen such diets at work. I have known people who have actually read all, or almost all, the guaranteed Hundred Best Books. God save us from reading nothing but the best.

My urge at Christmas time or Hanukkah-time or Kwanzaa-time is that people go to bookstores: that they walk around bookstores and look at the shelves. Go to look for authors that they've loved in the past and see what else those authors have written.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.