Quotes About Literature

You've got a face longer than a Dickens novel. What's the problem?

Whoever controls the supply of metaphor controls fiction! . . . Metaphor should be controlled. A glut on the market would make fiction overtly highbrow, painfully ambiguous, and potentially unreadable.

Rotten luck," said Falstaff as I walked past. "There were the remains of a fine woman about Havisham.

Some things are worth going to jail for, Victor," replied Bowden in an even tone. "As LiteraTecs we swore to uphold and defend the written word—not indulge a crazed politician's worst paranoic fantasies.

Until you get into the swing of it, play her subtly different on alternate readings. Hamlet's been doing it for years. Of course, he has twenty-six different ways of playing himself, but then he's had a lot of practice. In fact, I don't think even he knows his motivation any more- unless you count confusing readers and giving useful employment to Shakespearean scholars.

O sea que se puede ser un buen escritor siendo un grandísimo hijo de puta. Qué...

se puede ser un buen escritor siendo una pésima persona..." "De todas las historias de la historia", escribió Jaime Gil de Biedma, "sin duda la más triste es la de España, porque termina mal

Para escribir novelas no hace falta imaginación—dijo Bolaño—. Sólo memoria. Las novelas se escriben combinando recuerdos.

Uno de mis primeros entrevistados fue Roberto Bolaño. Bolaño, que era escritor y chileno, vivía desde hacía mucho tiempo en Blanes, un pueblo costero situado en la frontera entre Barcelona y Gerona, tenía cuarenta y siete años, un buen número de libros a sus espaldas y ese aire inconfundible de buhonero hippie que aqueja a tantos latinoamericanos de su generación exiliados en Europa.

People may claim to hate puns, but most true word lovers have groaned to like them.

There is no Great American Novel," she said absently. "This nation is too big and too diverse to produce only one great book. We've got lots of them and there will be more written in the future. Art doesn't stand still.

Life is too short to waste time on books that end badly." "By badly you mean unhappily, right?" "As far as I'm concerned, the two are synonymous.

In the past, bad literature was made with high-flown sentiment; today, it is made with the unconscious.

Gombrowicz, Nabokov, Svevo, Schnitzler, Canetti. How is it that the greatest are, in their varying degrees, violently hostile to psychoanalysis? And, ultimately, towards the end of his life, Freud himself ?

Any gloss on authors, their character traits or biographies, hides the fact that only bad writing has an author, good writing does not.

When I think of all the books I have yet to read, I am sure that I am still happy.

Be you writer or reader, it is very pleasant to run away in a book. Jean Craighead George

Good writers borrow, great writers steal. —T. S. Eliot (but possibly stolen from Oscar Wilde)

Cause I'm telling you, I read all the time. Seventy-five novels last year, I counted! Well, Goodreads counted.

It was all he could do not to laugh, the lives of the vast majority of authors being far more private than they likely wished. Maybe Stephen King or John Grisham got approached in the supermarket by a quavering person extending pen and paper, but for most writers, even reliably published and actually self-supporting writers, the privacy was thunderous.

All I really want to do is go to the book store , drink coffee and read

No se es escritor por haber elegido decir ciertas cosas, sino por la forma en que se digan

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

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