Quotes About Literature

The best way to get kids to read a book is to say: 'This book is not appropriate for your age, and it has all sorts of horrible things in it like sex and death and some really big and complicated ideas, and you're better off not touching it until you're all grown up. I'm going to put it on this shelf and leave the room for a while. Don't open it.

Tolkien, who created this marvellous vehicle, doesn't go anywhere in it. He just sits where he is. What I mean by that is that he always seems to be looking backwards, to a greater and more golden past; and what's more he doesn't allow girls or women any important part in the story at all. Life is bigger and more interesting than The Lord of the Rings thinks it is.

I have maintained a passionate interest in education, which leads me occasionally to make foolish and ill-considered remarks alleging that not everything is well in our schools. My main concern is that an over-emphasis on testing and league tables has led to a lack of time and freedom for a true, imaginative and humane engagement with literature.

The Lord of the Rings' is fundamentally an infantile work. Tolkien is not interested in the way grownup, adult human beings interact with each other. He's interested in maps and plans and languages and codes.

No one, not even Shakespeare, surpasses Milton in his command of the sound, the music, the weight and taste and texture of English words.

No literary work longer than a haiku is going to be entirely without faults.

Besides, if you want to write something perfect, write a haiku. Anything longer is bound to have a few passages that don't work as well as they might.

The narrating voice that tells 'Middlemarch' is just as much a made-up character as Dorothea or Mr. Casaubon.

The classroom is a torture chamber , interrogating poetry until it confesses.

He picked up a book that lay on the floor. "Are you reading this?" he said. It was Simon Talbot's The Constant Deceiver. "Yes," she said. "I'm not sure about it." "That should please him.

Literature got me into this mess and literature is going to have to get me out of it.

When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.

Don't tell me he's bisexual! Don't tell me this is more of the guy in the hallway! Don't tell me he wants us to have it off together, Philip Roth fucking Philip Roth! That, I'm afraid, is a form of masturbation too fancy even for me.

Perhaps,' I wearily suggest, 'reading is the opiate of the educated classes.' 'Is it? Are you thinking of becoming a flower child?' he says, lighting up a new cigar.

Politics is the great generalizer and literature the great particularizer, and not only are they in an inverse relationship to each other---they are in an antagonistic relationship.

they'll say, 'He never recovered from that breakdown and this was the result. It had to be the breakdown--not even he was that dreadful a novelist.

I don't know anybody. I turn sentences around, and that's it.

Gogol, Kafka y compañía… va a tener serios problemas si sigue por ese camino.

You're our Marcel Proust, Mr. Zuckerman. Zuckerman laughed. It wasn't exactly how he saw it.

Now Sentimental Education doesn't read as if Flaubert was having fun; Letter to His Father doesn't read as if Kafka was having fun; The Sorrows of Young Werther sure as hell doesn't read as if Goethe was having fun. Sure, Henry Miller seems like he's having fun, but he had to cross three thousand miles of Atlantic before saying 'cunt'.

The life he described sounded like paradise to me; that he could think to do nothing better with his time than turn sentences around seemed to me a blessing bestowed not only upon him but upon world literature.

Suppose all I have fallen in love with is that voice deliciously phrasing its English sentences? The man who died for the soothing sound of a highly calibrated relative clause.

And talking about books as though something were at stake in a book. Not opening up a book to worship it or be elevated by it or to lose yourself to the world around you. No, boxing with the book.

Il m'arrivait aussi, à l'occasion, d'être accosté dans les rues de New York par des inconnus qui se lançaient dans une rencontre orageuse avec moi à cause de quelque chose dans mes romans qui les séduisait ou qui les exaspérait, ou qui les séduisait parce que cela les exaspérait, ou qui les exaspérait parce que cela les séduisait.