Quotes About Literature

If you look at any list of great modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, you'll notice two things about them: 1. They all had editors. 2. They are all dead. Thus we can draw the scientific conclusion that editors are fatal.

Our original idea was to write a book titled Fifty Shades of the Hunger Games, by J.K. Rowling with Stephen King: A John Grisham Novel.

Then he got more books. He saved all the books.

The idea we came up with, well before we left, was something we coined Performance Literature. Excuse the use of that second word, because I realize it's presumptuous. Also, excuse the first word, and the term in general.

Here is a drawing of a stapler:

No man should have to endure another man quoting poetry.

That's what books do. They are the building blocks, the DNA, if you will, of you. Think of everything you have ever read, everything you have ever learned from holding a book in your hands and how that knowledge shaped you and made you who you are today. Looking back now on all those years, to when I first discovered books at the library, I see that I was simply falling in love. Day, after day, after glorious day, I was falling in love with books.

Maxine Beneba Clarke is a powerful and fearless storyteller, and this collection -- written with exquisite sensitivity and yet uncompromising -- will stay with you with the force of elemental truth. Clarke is the real deal, and will, if we're lucky, be an essential voice in world literature for years to come.

Unable to explore setting, conflict, characters or themes in their fiction, the mainstreamers wrote more and more eloquently about nothing at all.

I was nothing more than a thug with Tolstoy in my pocket.

The letters make words and words make us.

Why can't people just sit and read books and be nice to each other?

Oh yeah," said Annabelle. "If you want to drive yourself nuts spend a couple days zooming around country roads with Mr. Speedy while he drones on and on about some dead writer no one but him has ever heard of." "Sounds delightful," replied Chapman. "Sort of like gnawing off one's arm for sport." "Caleb

Why can´t people just sit and read books and be nice to each other?

You know people who read are a lot more tolerant and open-minded than those who don't.

Books were meant to be read, not displayed on a shelf for decoration.

I warned especially against phrases, often found in the physical literature, such as 'disturbing of phenomena by observation' or 'creating physical attributes to atomic objects by measurement'. Such phrases are…apt to cause confusion,…

Analog, or Asimov's Magazine, or The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

loss of faith helps explain the pervasive anomie, the feeling of aimlessness, meaninglessness, and sometimes even despair that shaped so much literature, art, philosophy, and scholarship in the twentieth century.

That illustrates my rule of thumb for reading history: View with suspicion any anecdote that makes a good enough story to have survived on its literary merits.

Contemporary fantasists all bow politely to Lord Tennyson and Papa Tolkien, then step around them to go back to the original texts for inspiration--and there are a lot of those texts. We have King Arthur and his gang in English; we've got Siegfried and Brunhild in German; Charlemagne and Roland in French; El Cid in Spanish; Sigurd the Volsung in Icelandic; and assorted 'myghtiest Knights on lyfe' in a half-dozen other cultures. Without shame, we pillage medieval romance for all we're worth.

the wisest writers, those who become most popular, learn to draw upon art and literature in order to create works that speak to audiences more strongly, more deeply, and appeal to a wider network of readers.

Good fiction's job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, The library, and step on it.