Quotes About Literature

Henry Louis Gates's edited The Classic Slave Narratives, which include Jacobs's as well as Frederick Douglass's autobiographies, continue to be so important to me.

I've seen a lot of the United States, having stayed in so many different cities and towns for work. It's such a strange and fascinating country, and instead of learning about it through a textbook, I would rather discover its history and traditions and institutions through fiction and nonfiction writers.

I have to submit to much in order to pacify the touchy tribe of poets.

Turn the pages of your Greek models night and day.

Foot-and-a-half-long words.

Give me a house furnished with books rather than furniture! Both, if you can, but books at any rate!

Foolish writers and readers are created for each other.

It is not opinions that man needs: it is TRUTH. It is not theology; it is God. It is not religion: it is Christ. It is not literature and science; but the knowledge of the free love of God in the gift of His only-begotten Son.

Wörter meine Fallschirme mit euch springe ich ab

Pericles' Golden Age produced the flowering which would lead to Athens' place in history and would crest in the marble-columned buildings and literary works which cornerstone the civilization of the West.

Membaca adalah tulang dan sumsum, limpa dan darah bagiku.

I exaggerate but only to revive the dying art of hyperbole.

Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1926), is still in print eighty years after it was written. I

For full details on the search of scientific literature that turned up one hundred thousand articles with evolution as a key work, see J. R. Staver, "Evolution and Intelligent Design," Science Teacher 70, no. 8 (2003): 32–35.

Decisi di diventare un beatnik a tutti gli affetti[...]. Fumai tutta la marijuana che mi passava tra le mani, lessi Kerouac, ascoltai Bob Dylan e Roland Kirk e andai a vedere film francesi che non capivo.

This particular blunder is known as deus ex machina , which is French for "Are you fucking kidding me?

When well executed, description is unobtrusive and lends substance to a novel. It is the body fat of prose: too much is unhealthy, but without any, you no longer have the thing—you have its skeleton.

Any of the following crimes against fiction can prevent the publication of your novel. Committing several will prevent the publication of novels by anyone whose name is similar to yours, just in case.

I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.

I knew the alphabet. Maybe I could be a writer.

Hamlet is egotism as it appears to itself, and Don Quixote is egotism as it appears to the detached observer.

When books sweep the world with characters and plots that seem unutterably grim...you have to ask whether we willingly incorperate such material into our lives because we need more shadows, clouds, drama, or perhaps because vicarious exposure to such material equips us, psychologically, for potential exposure to the real thing. [p35, Chapter 1 Taking the rough with the smooth]

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

I'm a reading addict. I can't live without it, like someone who is addicted to drugs.