Quotes About Literature

As we have sought through the centuries to define ourselves as human beings and as nations through the prisms of history and literature, no small part of that effort has drawn us to the subject of war. We might even say that the humanities began with war and from war, and have remained entwined with it ever since.

I live in London and I am a British subject, although I do write in Spanish, of course.

I am interested in the subject which is Russia.

Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.

The kind of stuff I usually read is a bit more on the literary side, like books that I think are influential in the sense that they're doing pulpy subject matter in a refined way. Like 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy; I loved that book.

Subject matter is sort of overemphasized in the way books get discussed, I think.

It may be time for serious literary novelists to take back some of the subject matter we abandoned to hack novelists and the movies.

It's very hard to deal with true subject matter, especially when you're writing about such weighty issues.

I sometimes feel like a British writer more so than I feel like an American writer. But I think that has to do with my subjective understanding of what it means to be either of those things.

Reviews are extremely subjective, but I have respect for them.

Nobody in France would ever say 'He's a Jewish novelist' or 'She's a black novelist,' even though people do write about those subjects. It would look absurd to a French person to go into a bookstore and see a 'Gay Studies' section.

I gradually became persuaded that the subjects, without intending to, had revealed to me a basic truth about markets that was foreign to the literature of economics.

No one ever became, or can become truly eloquent without being a reader of the Bible, and an admirer of the purity and sublimity of its language.

What any writer hopes for is that the reader will stick with you to the end of the contract and that there is a level of submission on the reader's part.

I didn't have any writer friends in college. I was a computer science major, but I was writing a lot, probably more than anybody I knew. I started to submit novels to New York when I was a freshman in college.

When I began writing in the mid-1960s, I thought it was not important for readers to know whether I was male or female. Also, I was a great admirer of E.B. White, so I may have thought that it would bring me luck to submit my first manuscript as 'E.L.' But if I were starting out today, I would use my first name.

Some people, especially literary people, they think, 'I'll write this original script, and it will be full of ideas. I'll submit it, and they'll hire me for television.' That's not the case.

I would be rejected if I submitted any of my novels as romance novels.

When it's between the covers of a book, content is perceived to have literary substance - or more so that it might otherwise.

The books I read I do enjoy, very much; otherwise I wouldn't read them. Most of them are for review, for the New York Review of Books, and substantial.

I could list hundreds of words I've come up against in the course of my work that did not exist in the era of which I was writing and for which I never could find a suitably old-time, archaic or obsolete substitute.

In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.

For kind of sophisticated art I'm interested in, the larger structural rebuke has to be so subtle that it has to be distributed at an almost sub-atomic level. Otherwise, you fall into the kind of preachy, moralistic fable that I don't think makes for good literature.

Publishers often push women in a subtle way to focus on fantasy and paranormal writing.