Quotes About Literature

the writing process behind The Tilted World.

Dat zou pas een boek zijn. Nog tijdens het lezen mag het papier verbrokkelen en rotten. Of nee, de inkt vergaat. Dat ware nog het mooist. Je bent onder aan een bladzijde, de duim waarmee je het boek vasthoudt, bevindt zich rechts onderaan, vlak onder het laatste woord, je blikt omhoog, naar de bladzijde die je net hebt gelezen, en de bovenste regel is al helemaal verdwenen, opgeslokt door de blankheid van zijn blad.

Wat is de duurtijd van een boek in tijden die zich van boeken lijken af te wenden?

Literature has to remain frustrating — to withhold something, remain incomplete — or it's not literature anymore, but rather entertainment, edification or interpretation. That's literature's USP: staying unresolved, keeping its most vital messages unspoken, creating a zone of noise where everything and nothing is said at the same time.

Satin Island, like all books, contains hundreds of borrowings, echoes, remixes and straight repetitions. To list them all would take up as much space as the text itself. The critical reader can entertain him- or herself tracking some of them down, if he or she is that way inclined.

It's very fluid, this space between philosophy and literature, and that's something that resonates for me.

He made me think of all the books I hadn't read, and all the ones I'd read but hadn't fully understood.

The man who said the pen was mightier than the sword ought to have tried reading "The Mill on the Floss" to Motor Mechanics.

Dragons, for instance, have the right of safe conduct anywhere in Faërie. A reader may not like to read stories about dragons, she may be morally offended or aesthetically uninterested or simply sick of the subject; but at any rate she will not complain that the author has cheated by bringing in a dragon, because dragons belong in fantasy.

You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?

I was quite a reader before I became a writer.

If we really felt bad about a book we had read and liked... we would feel shame, not guilt.

There is no such thing as nonfiction.

By one estimate, more books were printed in the first fifty years after Gutenberg's discovery than had been copied by all the scribes in Europe in the previous thousand years.

Czech: ?ekni mi, co ?teš, a já ti ?eknu, kdo jsi. English: Tell me what you read, and I'll tell you who you are. First president of Czechoslovakia.

it has now been translated into three languages. For the most part, this has

But picketing - picketing for or against something, and handing out literature - these are conspicuously formal actions. They have to be understood as indirect communication.

Who else is going to create the next great stories for kids to read?

What are these things that this houses, Eva?" Rovender picked up a crumbling tome. He handed it to her. "These are books," Eva said as the yellowed bits of paper flaked away in her hands to rest on the floor. "It's what humans used to put all of their writing in long ago.

Tubby flipped through the magazines stacked on

Back in our silences and sullen looks, for all the Scotch we drink, what's still between us not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books.

A Yellow Raft on Blue Water. He'd left it opened to page 158. A hard place to stop.

The idea that writerly originality appears from nowhere, or exists as something in isolation, a thing to be guarded and protected from influence, is lunacy. Anyone who doesn't school themselves by deep, wide, and idiosyncratic reading is choosing aesthetic poverty. Such aesthetic cloistering is like protecting your virginity in the belief that it will make you better at sex.

The truth is, a writer's voice is made from other writers' voices. Pieced together, picked and chosen, stumbled into, uninformed: influence seems like an involuntary series of contagions that eventually turns into a sort of vessel, or transportation system. As we acquire a sense of taste, and perhaps a sense of vocation, our reading becomes more directed and targeted, but we are bent and shaped and destined to be changed by the genius of others.