Quotes About Literature

Do you believe Shakespeare's Shylock and Dickens's Fagin have been of no use to anti-Semites?

This kind of fiction doesn't interest me.

Not as rabid a fan as, say, Nicholson Baker, but I do believe that The Poorhouse Fair, Of the Farm, and The Centaur are all great books, maybe classics. And even since '81's Rabbit Is Rich—as his characters seemed to become more and more repellent, and without any corresponding sign that the author understood that they were repellent—

None of the other famous phallocrats of Updike's generation—not Mailer, not Exley or Roth or even Bukowski—excites such violent dislike.

his foray into the futuristic-dystopic tradition of Huxley and Ballard and soft sci-

He was a reader and recognized his habit of reading as obsessive and neurotic…

How can I survive without a book to read?

In all the socialist literature I had read, there was hardly a chapter devoted to the creation of wealth, the problem of getting people to work or to behave in a civilized manner. Socialist theory was exclusively addressed to the conquest of power and the division of wealth that someone else had created. Was it any surprise that socialist societies had broken world records in making their inhabitants poor?

Words in books can remind us of truth, and help awaken us to it. But in themselves, words are just paint and writers are just painters . . . Let us not overestimate the power of any form of literature.

Shortly after the Civil War, religious leaders assailed pulp novels as "Satan's efficient agents to advance his kingdom by destroying the young.

candid , adj . Most times, when I'm having sex, I'd rather be reading. This was, I admit, a strange thing to say on a second date. I guess I was just giving you a warning. Most times when I'm reading, you said, I'd rather be having sex.

WHAT WAS JANE AUSTEN'S LAST FINISHED NOVEL? Vaginas and Virginity. WHO IS THE LAST PERSON IAGO KILLS IN OTHELLO? His manservant Retardio, for forgetting to change the Brita filter! WHAT HAPPENS TO THE LITTLE MERMAID AT THE END OF CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN'S THE LITTLE MERMAID? She turns into a fish and marries Nemo! Fuck you!

I have always found peace among books.

I preferred to hang out with the dead, dying, or desperate books - used we call them, in a way that we'd never call a person, unless we meant it cruelly

I stole Judy Blume's 'Forever' from my sister when I was eight,' I say. 'I figured if it was by the author of 'Superfudge', it had to be good. Well, I soon realized why she kept it under her bed. I'm not sure I understood it all, but I thought it was unfair that the boy would name his, um, organ, and the girl wouldn't name hers. So I decided to give mine a name.' Rhiannon is laughing. What was its name?' Helena. I introduced everyone to her at dinner that night. It went over really well.

Because, at heart, when I tell you I love books, what I am telling you is that I am a reader. Boil off all my pretensions, let my attempts at erudition rise away from me like steam, and what would be left would be a reader who is frequently amazed and educated by what words can do on a page.

Mostly I was spending time in the Strand, that bastion of titillating erudition. Not so much a bookstore as a collision of 100 different bookstores, with literary wreckage strewn over 18 miles of shelves.

I shed my borrowed life for an hour and put on the borrowed life of the book I'm reading.

there's something important about going back to books you've already read. You will always find new thing inside or have new reaction to characters you thought you already knew well. You learn more about the story and you also learn more about yourself as a reader, and where you are in life.

David Foster Wallace: We sit around and bitch about how TV has ruined the audience for reading—when really all it's done is given us the really precious gift of making our job harder.

Cambiando de postura en el sillín, Adam pensó que la forma en que su humilde vida seguía los moldes de la literatura tenía algo como de metempsicosis. ¿O quizá -se preguntó, hurgándose la nariz- era consecuencia de estudiar tan detenidamente las estructuras de las frases de los novelistas ingleses? Uno se había resignado a no tener ya un lenguaje privado, pero se aferraba melancólicamente a la ilusión de poseer los hechos de su vida.

Planeando su Balzac, Rodin llegó a rastrear a un sastre que el novelista había empleado cuarenta años antes; y le encargó un traje con las medidas del muerto.

Ese material se te ocurre cuando estás borracho? Preguntó un primo de Faulkner.

Zola nunca se encontró con Dreyfus.