Quotes About Literature

I read all the time. People ask, 'Do you read while you work?' And I say, 'I better.' I take two or three years to finish one of my enormous books, and I can't go that long without reading.

Personally, its a comfort and happiness to know that my work is taken seriously and is not marginalised and put in a box of ethnic immigrant writing in America.

The trouble is when people read about authors, they don't feel compelled to read the authors' work.

In Necessary Marriage, I tried to repeat entire phrases without the reader noticing. My work doesn't have the rigor of music, but I hope it alludes to it.

James Joyce buried himself in his great work. _Finnegan's Wake_ is his monument and his tombstone. A dead end.

I think one of the things that distinguished my work from the beginning when I was in college was my turning towards poetry from other countries.

It's hard to think that say Shakespeare could have written "The Tempest" when he was young. It seems to be reflective work or retrospective work.

The only literary men are those who have to work at it.

I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self.

I think the people who would be the least interested in my work would be people who read lots of comic books.

There are not many poets whose fame rests on a single work.

I lay off a lot modern fiction and only rely on living writers for non-fiction work.

In my work, I attempt to deal with the Bible as I would deal with any work of literature.

Often a purple patch or two is tacked on to a serious work of high promise, to give an effect of colour.

If there is a category of human being for whom his work ought to speak for itself, it is the writer.

Ben Bova seems to work very hard at working in new discoveries into his Glum Future but alas, his future is glum and not that well written.

Reading is not work, not a chore, not a drudgery; reading is the most joyful thing, yet, in the world.

The Bible, I've said it before, is a beautifully written work of fiction.

I am proud, and more than a little excited, to be asked to work with Faber in an editorial capacity. It is my dearest hope that we will produce some fantastic books together.

The most accomplished literary work would be reduced to nothing by carping criticism, if the author would listen to all critics and allow every one to erase the passage which pleases him the least.

I will read anything rather than work.

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

Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.

I wonder if novels work for women because they give us a safe place to talk about our ish.