Quotes About Literature

Whichever came first—the act or the myth—human sacrifice is one of history's oldest locomotives. Much of literature is about scapegoats: comedy is the story of expulsion from the point of view of society; tragedy is the same story from the point of view of the outcast.

Mais les livres représentaient-ils la vie ou ne cherchaient-ils qu'à nous en consoler?

The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.

I once overheard a young white man at a book festival say to his friend, "Have you read the new Kureishi? Same old thing—loads of Indian people." To which you want to reply, "Have you read the new Franzen? Same old thing—loads of white people.

It was in the shady groves of dictionaries that Jack fell in love.

Early on, for better or worse, I chose whose child I wanted to be: the child of the novel. Almost everything else was subjugated to this ruling passion, reading stories. As a consequence, I can barely add a column of double digits, I have not the slightest idea of how a plane flies, I can't draw any better than a five-year-old.

Happy is the novelist," claims Nabokov, "who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen; suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.

fiction can't be written to comply with winning arguments.

Poor Zora – she lived through footnotes.

and had a mauvais quart d'heure wondering whether she herself had any personality at all or was in truth only the accumulation and reflection of all the things she had read in books and seen on television.

Il romanzo e' una strada a due sensi dove la fatica che si richiede a entrambe le parti alla fine risulta uguale. Leggere, se lo si fa come si deve, e' difficile tanto quanto scrivere.

All I write is, to me, sentimental. A book which doesn't leave people either happier or better than it found them, which doesn't add some permanent treasure to the world, isn't worth doing… This is my "theory", and I maintain it's sentimental - at all events it isn't Flaubert's. How can he fag himself to write "Un Coeur Simple"?

That is a common mistake. The truth does not depend on what you read.

because white novelists are not white novelists but simply "novelists," and white characters are not white characters but simply "human," and criticism of both is not partial or personal but a matter of aesthetics. Such critics will always sound like the neutral universal, and the black women who have championed Their Eyes Were Watching God in the past, and the one doing so now, will seem like black women talking about a black book.

when she'd finished she would give one of four possible judgments. "Zippy"—which was good; "Important"—which was very good; "Controversial"—which could be either good or bad, you never knew; or "Lidderary," which was pronounced with a sigh and an eye roll and was very bad.

Portnoy was not Roth and he was not real, but in him is enshrined a genuine Rothian freedom, created by Roth, once impossible, now fully realized, a freedom which anyone can now easily access. You don't even have to read the book: you are already living in the world that Portnoy touched and changed.

He had liked to listen to the exotic (to a Belsey) chatter of business and money and practical politics; to hear that Equality was a myth, and Multiculturalism was a fatuous dream; he thrilled at the suggestion that Art was a gift from God, blessing only a handful of masters, and most Literature merely a veil for poorly reasoned left-wing ideologies.

After all, you can storm the house of a novel like Barthes, rearranging the furniture as you choose, or you can enter on your knees, like the pilgrim Nabokov thought you were, and try to figure out the cunning design of the place - the house will stand either way.

The only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving toward genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn't SF, but to tell them more or less patiently for forty or fifty years that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my argument by writing well").

i libri sono specchi in cui troviamo solo ciò che abbiamo dentro di noi, e (...) la lettura coinvolge mente e cuore, due merci sempre più rare.

Beatriz Aquilar : i libri sono specchi in cui troviamo solo ciò che abbiamo dentro di noi, e (...) la lettura coinvolge mente e cuore. - L'ombra del vento

Poezija rašoma ašaromis, apsakymai - krauju, o istorija - nematomu rašalu

the foot of his chair.