Quotes About Literature

It was very, very difficult to be a student in the drama department and also review my professors' school shows. I got a lot of pressure from them to quit the paper and concentrate on studying dramatic literature.

Having spent half my time at university studying English literature, I know from experience that reading lists often contain more white men than Jacob Rees-Mogg's last birthday party.

At 19, while studying at St Xavier's College and majoring in literature and sociology, I got my first job as a copywriter. It was at a company called the Script Shop.

A lot of the Qur'an is, frankly, cantankerous, vitriolic, man-hating stuff.

I wanted to avoid all that literary stuff. I didn't want the self pity of 'The Portrait,' all the moaning and the whingeing. I'm not knocking Joyce: we all owe him a debt. He's the one who made so much possible.

I have two quite large houses, and every cupboard and drawer is stuffed with books.

Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!

I was eighteen when I first read Joseph Heller's stunning work 'Catch-22,' and was at that time close to being drafted for the fruitless and unenlightened war in Viet Nam.

I am against censorship. I don't think there is anything more stupid than censorship.

I'm not that into reading. If I'm gonna read, I'm gonna read some cool sci-fi book or something, not some stupid self-help book.

Much publishing is done through politics, friends, and natural stupidity.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

It's a matter of style. The Evan Hunter style and the Ed McBain style are very, very different.

Kant's style is so heavy that after his pure reason, the reader longs for unreasonableness.

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

When we see a natural style, we are astonished and charmed; for we expected to see an author, and we find a person.

I don't read. I don't like to read 'Harry Potter' or anything like that. It's not my style.

I read Nabakov for style, Mary Karr for heart and resonance of where I come from. She's from the same part of the world that I'm from. Cormac McCarthy and Hemingway, to read the masters.

A contemporary artist can use the findings of all epochs and all styles, from the most primitive literary expressions up to the most refined products of the baroque.

The books I love most are the ones that combine some sort of gripping story with really beautiful or stylish writing. Some of my favorites are 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy, 'The Virgin Suicides' by Jeffrey Eugenides, 'The Interpreter of Maladies' by Jhumpa Lahiri, and 'Blindness' by Jose Saramago.

I'm no lyrical stylist; you wouldn't pick me for a perfect sentence, and I certainly wouldn't describe my novels as intellectual.

We talk about characters in literature as though they were built on the model of the real person, but then I often think that the way we present ourselves as real people is based heavily on the way literary psychologies are stylized, and I wonder how the two forms of realistic personhood feed on or fulfill each other.

When prose gets too stylized and out of control - and Stein is sometimes a good example - when you don't know what the hell is going on, then it's kind of boring.

English was always my favorite subject.