Quotes About Literature

My favourite all-time work of fiction: Lord of the Rings. My favourite all-time nonfiction book: Guns, Germs, and Steel. Ask me again next week, you'll get a different answer.

I never read anything concerning my work. I feel that criticism is a letter to the public which the author, since it is not directed to him, does not have to open and read.

My work is more driven by the creative word. It's immersed in other writing and printed work, rather than drawn so much from life or past experience.

To my mind, the prose in a non-fiction work that's going to endure has to be of the same quality as the prose in a work of fiction that endures.

Hardly anyone still reads nowadays. People make use of the writer only in order to work off their own excess energy on him in a perverse manner, in the form of agreement or disagreement.

There's so much to be found in literature, especially if you don't have the money to travel or the means to get out of your neighborhood or get off work.

David Burnett was the son of Martha Foley, who edited the Best American Short Stories series. She hired me to work with David and her to read stories for the anthology.

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.

Translations increase the faults of a work and spoil its beauties.

There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.

I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years.

I just finished Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad," which I think is a work of genius.

[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.

I don't think they [contemporary writers] read me either. I mean, if we're concerned genuinely with writing, I think we probably get on with our work.

Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.

I do tend to feel more connected to dead writers, perhaps because they have finished their work.

I would say that writing, both the act of writing, and of course reading of other people's work is, for me, supreme joy.

What is a historian? Someone who doesn't write well enough to work on a daily.

Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.

I love and care about literature, and great writers are our teachers. You're studying their mind when you read their work.

I never had money for anything. But I tell you what did really work - books. Between the covers of those books I could go anyplace, I could be anybody, I could do anything.

As it was, I realized choosing the study of Chinese literature as my life's work was probably a mistake.

I read a lot. I liked a tremendous number of poets and writers. The person whose work I liked the most was Joyce.

I love Sherlock Holmes. There's still an awful lot to steal from Conan Doyle. But within a tradition you can work in many different ways.