Quotes About Literature

Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.

Food-addiction, or food-drunkenness, is an old story in Hygienic literature. This is the first mention I have seen of it in "regular" medical literature. I fear to hope that its recognition spells progress.

Critici zijn beroepshalve verkeerd-lezers. Het begint er al mee dat lezen natuurlijk nooit een beroep mag worden; je bent ook geen beroepseter of beroepswandelaar. Het is onethisch. Lezen doe je voor je plezier.

Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.

Amelia Bedelia and Alice followed

The only imaginative fiction being written today is income tax returns.

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

Sleeplessness kept claiming her nights, and she used books as shields against the onslaught of her abstract terrors.

Because the worst literature, my father would say, is always written with the best intentions

Since her marriage, she had been left free to pursue her love of literature, inherited

In books, music, art I've always looked for emotion + elegance.

Misquotation is, in fact, the pride and privilege of the learned. A widely- read man never quotes accurately, for the rather obvious reason that he has read too widely.

The great threat to the young and pure in heart is not what they read but what they do not read.

The great threat to the young and pure in heart is not what they read but what they don't read.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said:"His sins were scarlet, but his books were read."

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: "His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.

Account books form a narrative as engaging as any tale of sea monsters or cannibals.

There's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.

I had read all the books so hard that when I gave them back the print was faint and gray with exhaustion

It is not as if it is tales out of Boccaccio.' She laughs. 'They could tell Boccaccio a tale, those sinners at Wolf Hall.

It is a sure sign of troubled minds, the habit of quotation. "Whom

For a month he is at home: he reads.

For a young reader that's an important moment, when you recognize that your self exists in the world and that your self exists in literature.