Quotes About Literature

I need to feel strongly, to love and to admire, just as desperately as I need to breathe. A letter from a friend, a Balthus painting on a postcard, a page of Saint-Simon, give meaning to the passing hours. But to keep my mind sharp, to avoid descending into resigned indifference, I maintain a level of resentment and anger, neither too much nor too little, just as a pressure cooker has a safety valve to keep it from exploding.

Her library is a meeting place for all who love books. They discuss matters of the world and matters of the spirit.

A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

Six books… my mother didn't want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone.

Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person who makes the work and the person who comes to the work both have a job to do. I am never wilfully obscure, but I do ask for some effort.

A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.

Ne sachant quoi lire ni dans quel ordre, j'ai suivi l'alphabet. Dieu merci, elle s'appelait Austen...

It was like living in a library, and that was where I had always been happiest.

I was only good at one thing: words. I had read more, much more, than anybody else, and I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked.

I think men can really get in the way when you are trying to sort your life out and get on with it. Because they just take up so much space. I'm not under any illusions that I could have been where I am now in literary terms if I had been heterosexual. I really believe I would not be.

Annem elimin kitaba deÄŸmesini istemiyordu.Kitaplar?n içine bal?klama dalaca??m akl?na bile gelmedi-saklanmak için kendimi onlara hapsedeceÄŸim de.

There's a new kind of quasi-religious discourse forming, with its own followers, its creed, its orthodoxy, its heretics, its priests, its literature, its eschatological framework. Even its own Singularity. It's AI.

And I thought about women. All these books, and how long had it taken for women to write their share, and why were their still so few women poets and novelists, and even fewer who were considered to be important?

The more I read the more I fought against the assumption that literature is for the minority - of a particular education or class. Books were my birthright too.

I have ridden out all the storms," said Shakespeare, "even the ones I wrote myself. Here, look, it begins…

Ti do un consiglio: quando sei giovane e ti capita di leggere qualcosa che non ti piace affatto, mettilo da parte e rileggilo tra tre anni dopo. Se ancora non ti piace, rileggilo dopo altri tre anni. E quando sei giovane - quando arrivi ai cinquant'anni come me - rileggerai il libro che ti è piaciuto in assoluto di meno.

Let me read to you," said Roger Nowell. "It is a night for reading.

Mia madre non voleva che i libri cadessero nelle mie mani. Non aveva previsto che io potessi cadere nei libri, che mi infilassi dentro di loro per stare al sicuro.

got a sense early on that the power of a text is not time-bound. The words go on doing their work.

That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.

When under stress I thought of] the books I had read [and applied] them to myself. I [imagined I was] one of the characters [and soon found myself] in made-up circumstances which were most agreeable to my inclinations.