Quotes About Literature

Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism. The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

Each novel is a message in a bottle cast into the great ocean of literature from somewhere else (even if it was written and published last week in your home town); and what makes the novel available to its readers is not shared values or beliefs or experiences but the human capacity to conjure new worlds in the imagination. A fully realized novel provides readers with everything they need for their imaginations to go to work.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

She still had her own cave, because of the whole accidentally-setting-your-clawmates-on-fire-while-sleepwalking-would-be-bad thing.

I'm at a really good part," she said apologetically, holding up her book.

it has always seemed to me that books are the supreme decorations of a room

I read novels with the utmost pertinaity. I look upon them - I look upon good novels - as a very valuable part of literature, conveying more exact and finely-distinguished knowledge of the human heart and mind than almost any other, with greater beadth and depth and fewer contraints.

should very much like to see your excrement.' 'You shall, my dear sir, you shall.

She had begun to read in the beginning as a protection from the frightening and unpleasant things. She continued because, apart from the story, literature brought with it a kind of gentility for which she craved.

As it is I'm a dated novelist, whom hardly anybody reads, or if they do, most of them don't understand what I am on about. Certainly I wish I had never written Voss, which is going to be everybody's albatross.

Fiction should always steer clear of political considerations.

Isn't that the essence of literature?...Our ability to identify with characters, no matter that they're separated from us by thousands of miles and hundreds of lifetimes. We may have no Mount Vesuvius looming over us. It may not be lava and ashes we fear. But we look at these forms, and we know what they felt.

Oulipo does not "explain" poetry, Ouilpo tries to find constraints for new kinds of poems. Oulipo is not into theory, it is a place of creation.

Many things people like, especially if they're young and ambitious, they like largely for the feeling of virtue in liking them. 99% of people reading Ulysses are thinking I'm reading Ulysses as they do it.

whenever I want to stop myself being too Marxist about the future, I think about Shakespeare.

And you read your emily dickinson, And I my robert frost. And we note our place with bookmarkers That measure what weve lost.

You know you've read a good book when you turn to the last page and feel as little as if you have lost a friend.

Åžtii ca ai citit o carte bun? când întorci ultima pagin? ÅŸi simÅ£i c? parc? ai pierdut un prieten.

Reading made me a traveler; travel sent me back to books.

The topography of literature, the fact in fiction,is one of my pleasures -- I mean, where the living road enters the pages of a book, and you are able to stroll along both the real and imagined road.

People will tell you, "What's the use? What's the point of reading novels and poetry?" They'll tell you to go to law school or to be an economist or to do something useful. But books are useful. Books will make you thoughtful, and they might even make you happy. They will certainly help you to become more civilized.

If I read enough about one country I sometimes found that the intensity of the reading removed by desire to travel there.

I cannot think of any writer of stature in English who has not shown a knowledge of the Bible.