Quotes About Literature

The passion to teach, to share deeply experienced "lessons from life," is embedded in all literature.

In school you learned to write as if the reader Were in constant danger of getting lost, A problem you were taught to solve not by writing clearly But by shackling your sentences and paragraphs together. Think about transitions. Remember how it goes? Late in the paragraph you prepare for the transition to the next paragraph— The great leap over the void, across that yawning indentation. You were taught the art of the flying trapeze, But not how to write.

I wanted to walk into the library on Fifth Avenue with the lions sitting outside and be able to look up my name in the card catalog. I wanted those walls to have just one book with my name on it.

La ironía es la mejor arma que poseen el periodista y el escritor.

England has two books, one which she has made and one which has made her: Shakespeare and the Bible.

The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.

He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.

When I was about 13 or 14, I had an English teacher who made a deal with me that I could get out of doing all of the year's regular work if I would write a short story a week and on Friday read it to the class.

An unhappy ending makes it literature rather than romantic fiction.

I think there is nothing more completely beautiful and more beautifully complete than walls lined with well-arranged books.

You may as well attempt to colonise the moon with white mice as publish a volume of poetry'.

The beauty of literature is you allow readers to see things through other peoples eyes. All good books do this.

The beauty of the written word is that it can be held close to the heart and read over and over again.

At college, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything.

Oh, friend, forget not, when you fain would note In me a beauty that was never mine, How first you knew me in a book I wrote, How first you loved me for a written line.

Take the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or beauty or form, we are borrowers.

I read pretty voraciously. If it's good, I don't care what it is.

The English Bible - a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.

I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.

In my writing, I strive for a lyrical beauty somewhere between Tolkien at his best and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf.

Writing well is the best revenge.

I cannot choose one hundred best books because I have only written five

Holden Caulfield is the best character in literature, period.

The best place to find things: the public library.