Quotes About Literature

That's because this story lacks a cantabile melody. Its rhythm is sometimes discordant. And it has facts. I suddenly fell for facts without literature — facts are hard stones and action is now more interesting to me than thinking, you can't get away from facts.

Ainda que eu seja mais uma ninguém a vagar sem rosto pelas rodas de livros, pelas prateleiras, tenho a sensação de ser uma penetra. Tanta coisa escrita, tanta gente escrevendo. Por que eu escrevo? O que eu tenho a dizer que já não tenha sido dito de milhares de maneiras diferentes? A quem interessa o meu corpo de letras?

I am absolutely tired of literature; only muteness keeps me company.

Você e Tania sugerem que eu releia e desentorte o livro. Mas eu não consigo mais entrar dentro do ambiente dele. Para mim é como ler uma coisa vazia e eu tenho que parar de palavra em palavra para me concentrar, exatamente como eu encaro o primeiro livro, com o qual felizmente eu nada mais tenho a ver.

Uma pessoa leu meus contos e disse que aquilo não era literatura, era lixo. Concordo. Mas há hora para tudo. Há também a hora do lixo. (Someone read my stories and said that it wasn't literature, it was rubbish. I agree. But there is time for everything. There's also garbage time).

There's something very comforting about books.

La littérature est parfaitement inutile, sa seule utilité est qu'elle aide à vivre.

Qué sería para ella "leer enfermizamente"? ¿Cuántas horas por día? ¿Cuántos libros por mes? ¿Sería consciente de que me lo estaba diciendo a mí, que soy librera?

Así sucede con los grandes personajes de la literatura, siempre encontramos un punto, una arista, un gesto donde podemos ser ellos.

Así sucede con los grandes personajes de la literatura, siempre encontramos un punto, una arista, un gesto donde podemos ser ellos. O al menos podemos ponernos en su lugar.

I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.

Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance.

The Bible's a lot of regurgitated garbage. There's no way all the truth can be contained in one book.

A good read is one of the amazing pleasures offered to us by civilization.

A book is a journey of a thousand paragraphs. You begin with the first one.

An elementary pupil was asked by the teacher about her view of writing. The little girl said, Good writing requires a good vocabulary. A good writer requires a good conduct in many ways.

When you read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.

When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than was there before.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.

The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.

As for those who think they don't like to read, well, I know they're making a mistake, just as all of us do when we try to judge ourselves. Now is the time to give reading a chance, for if you don't get the habit when you're young you may never get it. And if you don't get it, you may grow up to be just as dull as most adults are.