Quotes About Literature

'Lagoon' is an ambitious novel.

But the animation has become very good, and I think that a movie is not a book, and a book is not a movie.

I think Anna Tambour is criminally under-read.

You wouldn't read 'Anna Karenina' and try to work on the computer at the same time, would you?

I love reading; I really enjoy it. I read books quite fast, which kind of annoys me, but I like it at the same time because I can read a book in a day.

Being a writer but also having been raised the way I was, I tend to turn to books for answers.

Generally, I'm not anti the novel.

I'm not a reader myself, so I don't expect anyone else to be.

I am extremely passionate about reading and like to read about anything and everything under the sun.

I read more than I do anything else, probably. I read about three books a week.

Certainly in the case of 'Kill Your Friends,' a book I wrote more than 10 years ago, I routinely meet interviewers who appear to know the book better than I do. But still, you have to talk about it.

Men feel safe and more open when they know that the woman they're talking to approves of their passion for a particular band/book/cereal.

It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.

American students arrive at college knowing almost nothing about history, literature, art, or philosophy.

I never read articles about my books.

I don't believe in being ashamed about not having read things.

Once every woman was a living gazette, a font of delicious slanders cast in beautiful language.

a true Provencal version of the Harlowe family.

Un jeune homme se présenta pour être rédacteur de l'air timide et inquiet qu'avait Lucien naguère. Lucien vit avec un plaisir secret Giroudeau pratiquant sur le néophyte les plaisanteries par lesquelles le vieux militaire l'avait abusé ; son intérêt lui fit parfaitement comprendre la nécessité de ce manége, qui mettait des barrières presque infranchissables entre les débutants et la mansarde où pénétraient les élus.

Just as Clara Gazul is the female pseudonym of a distinguished male writer, George Sand the masculine pseudonym of a woman of genius, so Camille Maupin was the mask behind which was long hidden a charming young woman, very well-born, a Breton, named Felicite des Touches, the person who was now causing such lively anxiety to the Baronne du Guenic and the excellent rector of Guerande.

Balzac's first works were written without any overall plan, but by 1830 the author began to group his first novels (e.g. Sarrasine, Gobseck) into a series entitled Scènes de la vie privée (Scenes from Private Life).

In 1839, for the first time Balzac mentioned in a letter to his publisher the expression La Comédie humaine and the title is recorded in the contract he signed in 1841.

And lastly, here in Paris there is a spirit which you breathe in the air; it infuses the least details, every literary creation bears traces of its influence. You learn more by talk in a cafe, or at a theatre, in one half hour, than you would learn in ten years in the provinces. Here, in truth, wherever you go, there is always something to see, something to learn, some comparison to make.

La hardiesse du vrai s'élève à des combinaisons interdites à l'art, tant elles sont invraisemblables ou peu décentes, à moins que l'écrivain ne les adoucisse, ne les émonde, ne les châtre.