Quotes About Literature

Picture books are the distillation of an idea, and you have to use just the right words. I love that, and I try to use a lot of action verbs.

Effective stream-of-consciousness narration is the product of verbal precision, not just of literal documentation. It is decidedly not a matter of unedited free-association.

I say that glorious prose is a fine and laudable thing, but without an enthralling story, it's just so much verbal tapioca. Simply put, the best books have both, and the best writers disparage neither.

We grew up on Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, Samuel Beckett. You're making something about men on the verge of a nervous breakdown, you're going to look to those guys.

I spent many years in college studying English literature. I was on the verge of attending grad school to get a Ph.D. in Renaissance poetry - my lost careers were being a writer, artist, or academic. Do I regret spending all that time poring over Shakespeare when I could have been getting a jump start on the competition? Not at all.

I read Jilly Cooper when I was on the verge of just growing up and I was becoming a woman.

One of the interesting things about the 'Decameron' itself was it was written in the Florentine dialect as opposed to the Latin vernacular - and that was mainly to have it be a piece of literature for the people as supposed to some kind of highfalutin' canon.

I definitely look up to Veronica Roth, Suzanne Collins, and J.K. Rowling.

Vivian Abenshushan and Veronica Gerber write brilliant books that defy generic conventions.

Can we call the essay its own genre if it's so promiscuously versatile? Can we call any genre a 'genre' if, when we read it from different angles and under different shades of light, the differences between it and something else start becoming indistinguishable?

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

All which is not prose is verse; and all which is not verse is prose.

I always loved reading. Growing up, my favorite book was 'A Child's Garden of Verses,' by Robert Louis Stevenson.

It was the enchantment of spoken verse that led me to write for children.

The vast majority of free verse is ghastly. Utterly ghastly. No one reads it. No one listens to it.

Verse satire indeed is entirely our own.

If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

When we started reading books to Raffi, I included some Russian ones. A friend had handed down a beautiful book of Daniil Kharms poems for children; they were not nonsense verse, but they were pretty close, and Raffi enjoyed them.

I couldn't believe verse was supposed to be hard. It was a snap for me. I loved Shakespeare.

What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose.

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.

The earliest form in which romances appear is that of a rude kind of verse.

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.