Quotes About Literature

What's Hemingway?" Astor said. I watched the crowd of look-alikes milling around on the sidewalk, jostling each other and slurping beer. "A man who grew a beard and drank a lot," I said.

James M. Cain (1892–1977) wrote two indisputable masterpieces, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity.

the Nero Award, and he is a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Readers Award for Best Short Story of the Year and a winner of the British Thumping Good Read Award.

Anthony Boucher (1911–1968) was one of the most remarkable figures ever produced by the mystery genre. And

His best work bore the stamp of John O'Hara and John P. Marquand.

The experience of watching Leonard get better was like reading certain difficult books. It was plowing through late James, or the pages about agrarian reform in Anna Karinina, until you suddenly got to a good part again, which kept on getting better and better until you were almost grateful for the previous dull stretch because it increased your eventual pleasure. All of a sudden, Leonard was his old self again, extroverted, energetic, charismatic, and spontaneous.

Faulkner didn't put those

Twenty-one Short Stories by Graham Greene.

He began with The Bigger They Come by Erle Stanley Gardner, before moving on to Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," which, Mr. Holcombe pointed out, contained every letter in the alphabet. I checked, and he turned out to be right.

You should read more Oscar Wilde," said Charlie, "and less Maynard Keynes.

To start with, look at all the books.

She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.

She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.

I'm the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights...How wonderful it was when one sentence followed logically from the sentence before!...There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world.

and the magisterial presence of all those words stopped her in her tracks.

She wanted a book to take her places she couldn't get to herself. She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.

Luce even analyzed my prose style to see if I wrote in a linear, masculine way, or in a circular, feminine one.

The experience of watching Leonard get better was like reading certain difficult books. It was like plowing through late James, or the pages about agrarian reform in Anna Karenina, until you suddenly got to a good part again, which kept on getting better and better until you were so enthralled that you were almost grateful for the previous dull stretch because it increased your eventual pleasure.

And yet sometimes she worried about those musty old books were doing to her. Some people majored in English to prepare for law school. Others became journalists.

The magisterial presence of all those potentially readable words stopped her in her tracks.

Instead of eating his lunch, he told you what Oblonsky and Levin had for lunch in Anna Karenina. Or, describing a sunset from Daniel Deronda, he failed to notice the one that was presently falling over Michigan.

Derrida is my absolute god!