Quotes About Literature

In these days when anything goes in literature, movies, and even TV, to think there are some places so isolated, so backward, so ill-informed as to what's going on in the world

Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.

I took five years on the first volume, five years on the second volume, and ten years on the third volume.

I am writing my second novel for children for Simon and Schuster.

I also really liked playing Mr. Tumnus in 'Narnia'. I got to play my favorite character in children's literature, which I loved. You don't get the chance to do that in other jobs.

The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot.

Don't give me books for Christmas; I already have a book.

I give out Atlas Shrugged as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it.

It has historically been a comfort for the bourgeois and that you can read the most extreme books and not change. You can read A Christmas Carol and not change in any way.

Chum was a British boy's weekly which, at the end of the year was bound into a single huge book; and the following Christmas parents bought it as Christmas presents for male children.

Books woke me up. Books are my favorite man-made objects. I fetishize their design, smell, feel. And that they can contain such burning, complex communications is a miracle to me.

With a book tucked in one hand, and a computer shoved under my elbow, I will march, not sidle, shudder or quake, into the twenty-first century.

I have the same confidence in the ability of our people to reject noxious literature as I have in their capacity to sort out the true from the false in theology, economics, or any other field.

I think one thing I've learned, as dorky and obvious as this sounds: People who like cool books are usually really cool people.

I loved Gore Vidal's Burr. That book gave me courage.

Dad said I would always be "high minded and low waged" from reading too much Ralph Waldo Emerson. Maybe he was right.

Both my parents were big readers. My dad liked more macho adventure books like Shogun or spy novels. My mother reads murder mysteries. In fact, so does her mother, my grandma.

The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

Literature can teach us how to live before we live, and how to die before we die. I believe that writing is practice for death, and for every (other) transformation human beings encounter.

The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it.

After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.

Leisure without literature is death and burial alive.

It is when we are faced with death that we turn most bookish.