Quotes About Literature

In seventh grade, with some vague sense that I wanted to be a writer, I crouched in the junior high school library stacks to see where my novels would eventually be filed. It was right after someone named Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. So I grabbed a Vonnegut book, 'Breakfast of Champions' and immediately fell in love.

When I was growing up as a young lesbian in the '50s, I looked in vain for books about my people. I did find some paperbacks with lurid covers in the local bus station, but they ended with the gay character's committing suicide, dying in a car crash, being sent to a mental hospital, or 'turning' heterosexual.

In the heady days that followed the success of 'Mahabharat,' I was young, vain and didn't care much about the story. But in the next two decades, I read a lot on the epic.

Great song lyrics are as valid a part of American literature as any novel.

It's a perfectly valid position to not like Shakespeare.

Children's literature is as valid an art form as any other.

In the culture at large, the war over science fiction's creative validity has been long since won, but guardians at the gates of literature, movies, and TV linger unconvinced, even as other genres fitfully transcend critical perceptions of insubstantiality.

I read a lot when I was young. All the obvious, all the greats, from 'Le Grand Meaulnes,' 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' 'Fear and Loathing,' 'Catcher in the Rye,' 'The Bell Jar,' 'The Female Eunuch,' 'Valley of the Dolls,' 'The Feminine Mystique,' Tom Wolfe. Then, film took over for me. Film was so exciting in the '70s.

I grew up as an avid reader. I would go to the library and check out 40 books a week. Some of them were smarty books; most of them were 'Sweet Valley High' and young teen romance.

Many writers can't make a living. So to be able to teach how to write is valuable to them. But I don't really know about its value to the student. I don't mean it's useless. But I wouldn't have wanted anyone to teach me how to write.

The more I like a book, the more slowly I read. this spontaneous talking back to a book is one of the things that makes reading so valuable.

The single thing I've found it valuable to memorize is poetry.

The Chinese have a habit of reading. Many families regard books as the most valuable family asset.

Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they passed.

Cruelty is not a literary value.

I think enough cannot be said for what you can discover through literature. So I think that was probably my most valued characteristic as a teenager.

Getting 'Millionaire' right was as hard as writing 'Dirty Pretty Things.' Harder. In the pilots, contestants kept wanting to take the money; we had to find ways - the lifelines - of keeping them in the seat, answering the questions. But there is so much snobbery about popular culture. A game show just isn't valued as much as a novel.

'Catcher in the Rye' changed my life when I was a kid. I read it as I was a boy turning into a man, and I was so fascinated by the values. I believe in it.

Tom Wolfe was in town and I invited him over to the house to meet Hunter. The two of them were great fans of each other, Hell's Angels and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test were almost companion books, yet these men had never met.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE hanged himself at age forty-six. I had sent one of our best new feature writers, David Lipsky, out to profile Wallace when Infinite Jest was first published in 1996.

Not a trace of its use for literature has survived. The Iliad and Odyssey were composed and transmitted by nonliterate bards for nonliterate listeners, and not committed to writing until the development of the Greek alphabet hundreds of years later.

I'm not addicted to books. I can stop reading once I've finished one more chapter.

It made them feel, as all good books do, less alone.

You see? I know where every single book used to be in the library.' She pointed to the shelf opposite. 'Over there was Catch-22 , which was a hugely popular fishing book and one of a series, I believe.