Quotes About Literature

Austen is a moralist, but, as John Lauber has put it, she is not a punitive moralist. Sometimes her villains receive no more serious punishment than to achieve their desires. Often that is punishment enough.

The Bible is closer to poetry than to a scientific manual, and the biblical writers' use of words is more like that of poets than of linguists or scientists.

Without question, the most famous book ever written about angling is The Compleat Angler published by Izaak Walton in 1653. Since

Philosophy says truth, literature shows truth.

Philosophy makes literature clear, literature makes philosophy real.

Literature in the West arose from liturgy.

But this is exactly why I read--and don't belong to a book group--because reading is the most individual thing there is. Why collectivize it? Didn't we have enough bad English teachers in school? Crowd sourcing and literature shouldn't mix.

For once in California there was an integration of art with avant-garde literature and music.

Auden is an accomplished rhymer and Shakespeare is not.

used to write her books.

the materials of genre - specifically the paired genres of horror and the fantastic - in no way require the constrictions of formulaic treatment, and in fact naturally extend and evolve into the methods and concerns of its wider context, general literature.

No matter how serious the tone, literature offers pleasure in its construction as well as in its content

has profoundly modified the whole trend of modern civilisation, imposing her thought, her standards, her literary forms, her imagery, her visions and dreams wherever she is known. But Germany is the supreme example of her triumphant spiritual tyranny. The Germans have imitated the Greeks more slavishly: they have been obsessed by them more utterly…

Books have led some to learning and others to madness.

One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation.

the startling line in J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, where Captain Hook is described: "The man isn't wholly evil; he has a thesaurus in his cabin.

Here's a typical list: Song of Solomon (for Michael Jordan), Things Fall Apart (Bill Cartwright), Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (John Paxson), The Ways of White Folks (Scottie Pippen), Joshua: A Parable for Today (Horace Grant), Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (B.J. Armstrong), Way of the Peaceful Warrior (Craig Hodges), On the Road (Will Perdue), and Beavis & Butt-Head: This Book Sucks (Stacey King). Some players read every

One cannot judge by book being best seller. We all know that. Many best sellers are terrible trash.

It's impossible that James Joyce could have mentioned talk-tapes in his writing, Asher thought. Someday I'm going to get my article published; I'm going to prove that Finnegan's Wake is an information pool based on computer memory systems that didn't exist until a century after James Joyce's era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus of work. I'll be famous forever.

Never walk over a writer, I said to myself, unless you're positive he can't rise us behind you. If you're going to burn him, make sure he's dead. Because if he's alive, he will talk: talk in written form, on the printed, permanent page.

There are celebrated literary lions who've won Pulitzers and Booker prizes for ideas that Dick would toss aside in an early chapter, but … oh, what's the use. You evidently already know the score, because you're reading this.

Observing her youth, her automatic radiance, he said, "'I feel as old as yonder elm.'" "From Finnegans Wake," Kathy said happily. "When the old washerwomen at dusk are merging into trees and rocks." "You've read Finnegans Wake?" he asked, surprised.

Like a graveyard for soldiers, he thought morbidly as he moved about, feeling compressed by the smallness of the room. On a wicker table a copy of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. "How far'd you get into it?" he asked her. "To Within a Budding Grove.

You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso.