Quotes About Literature

Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.

The only thing I can say that is wonderful about my mother is she forced me to learn three verses of the Bible every day of my life, and I've read the Bible now five times and it taught me the English language.

Believe it or not, I sold my first novel, 'Crank,' with only seventy-five pages complete. It was in verse then, and it was hard-hitting then.

I would like to champion diverse forms like graphic novels and works told in verse and diverse writers and illustrators and diverse authors as well.

The iambic line, with its characteristic forward movement from short to long, or light to heavy, or unstressed to stressed, is the quintessential measure of English verse.

There are people who think it's easier to write books in verse, and it's definitely not.

Believe it or not, one of the first poets I was aware of was Yeats. I recited 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' at a verse speaking competition when I was eight or nine.

Novelists get to say plenty in their massive tomes; rock singers only get four-minute songs with two verses and a chorus' worth of lyrics, and so there's a real pleasure in accessing the intelligence behind the music, even if it doesn't qualify as 'great literature.'

Films for TV have to be much closer to the book, mainly because the objective with a TV movie that translates literature is to get the audience, after seeing this version, to pick up the book and read it themselves. My attitude is that TV can never really be any form of art, because it serves audience expectations.

The first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I'd ever submitted to New York editors.

I was about 12 when I first encountered 'The Moonstone' - or a Classics Illustrated version of it - digging through an old trunk in my grandfather's house on a rainy Bengali afternoon.

Milan Kundera was my literature professor. He's a Francophile, so he made us read French novels like 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses,' which I made a version of many years later as 'Valmont.'

I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for.

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

Books on horse racing subjects have never done well, and I am told that publishers had come to think of them as the literary version of box office poison.

In the case of The Loved One, I was hired to collaborate on an updated version of the book.

One of the first serious attempts I made to write a novel was when I was in Grade 6 and I had read 'Matilda.' I wrote my own version and my teacher had it bound and permitted me to read it to the class - cementing my love of reading, writing and Roald Dahl!

De boeken van Genet zijn bordelen, waarin je door een kiertje naar binnen glipt, in de hoop dat je er niemand zult tegenkomen; zodra je binnen bent, blijk je volstrekt alleen te zijn.

La lecture est un rêve libre

A la vérité, il forçait un peu sur le sublime : c'était un homme du XIXe siècle qui se prenait, comme tant d'autres, comme Victor Hugo lui-même, pour Victor Hugo.

even today, I would rather read 'thrillers' than Wittgenstein.

The genius of Proust is the totality of the works of Proust

Sentences live—they reach out, they move and breathe.

Our best writers read the most.