Quotes About Literature

He opened my eyes to just how great S. J. Perelman was, superior to all other funny minds, an axiom I hold to this day.

He hecho un curso de lectura veloz y he leído Guerra y paz en veinte minutos. Habla de Rusia.

Para acabar con los libros de recuerdos Memorias de los años veinte Alice Toklas me preguntó si estaba enamorado de Gertrude Stein ya que le había dedicado un libro de poemas aunque eran de T.S. Eliot y dije que sí, que la amaba, pero el asunto nunca podría funcionar porque ella era demasiado inteligente para mí y Alice Toklas estuvo de acuerdo, y luego nos pusimos unos guantes de boxeo y Gertrude Stein me rompió la nariz.

I am one who shares Saul Bellow's estimate of Hemingway rather than John Updike's. I could pick up any book of his and turn to any page and read and the poetry of his prose kills me.

So what character in fiction do you most identify with?" she pressed him. Finally, he said, "Gregor Samsa." "My god, you kill me." She laughed.

We had some fine chats about Jesus, Homer, and the Rig Veda from a strictly automotive point of view.

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own.

Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field-but they're all we have.

If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins.

A great literary work can be completely, completely unpredictable. Which can sometimes make them very hard to read, but it gives them a great originality.

I can't understand how a man who seems never to read imaginative writing of any kind (novels, poetry, short stories, high-brow, middle-brow, low-brow, anything) can understand life, people, the world. I don't care if ordinary people read or not. It's not for me to say how people should live. But people who have power over me? I want them to read because their limited, impoverished dreams may become my nightmares.

L'Europa conseguì la leadership della cultura mondiale non mediante la ricchezza materiale, ma mediante la preminenza nelle cose dello spirito: nella scienza, nella letteratura e nelle idee. Essa creò gli ideali che il resto del mondo seguì. Se la democrazia moderna dovesse comportare la cessazione di questa missione e l'abbandono della leadership spirituale per l'appagamento materiale, allora ciò significherebbe proprio il declino della cultura occidentale.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

Working in Moscow from 1933 until 1945, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács (1885–1971) developed a theory of "Critical Realism" with respect to literature. Lukács admired narrative novelists such as Cervantes (1547–1616), Balzac (1799–1850), Dickens (1812–70), Gorky (1868–1936), Tolstoy (1828–1910) and Thomas Mann (1875–1955).

During the time at home, Chris focused on a peculiar story he'd first heard years before. An elderly friend had asked him to trim some of her overgrown trees, and as a thank-you she'd given Chris a book about the strange adventures of Patrick Leigh Fermor, known to everyone as Paddy. Paddy was Chris's kind of adventurer—gallant, literary, madcap, merry. Chris dug around for more and soon learned about Paddy's daffy scheme to kidnap a German general.

Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a 'good' book. A book is 'good' only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error.

Calling us men doesn't make us men. No creature on earth has a right to think himself a human being if he doesn't know at least one good book.

The beauty of being a bookseller is that you don't have to be a literary critic: all you have to do to books is enjoy them.

It's one of the uncanniest things I know to watch a real book on its career?it follows you and follows you and drives you into a corner and makes you read it.

Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing.   Let us prescribe for you.

As far as I can see, a man who's fond of books never need starve!

I have always suffered from the feeling that it's better to read a good book than to write a poor one; and I've done so much mixed reading in my time that my mind is full of echoes and voices of better men. But this book I'm worrying about now really deserves to be written, I think, for it has a message of its own.

It always seemed to me that [Henry James] had a kind of rush of words to the head and never stopped to sort them out properly.

It's in books that most of us learn how splendidly worth-while life is.