Quotes About Literature

Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective.

and said that he still had his evening's reading. He did not do justice to a writer unless he read him on consecutive days and for no less than three hours at a sitting. Otherwise, despite his notetaking and underlining, he lost touch with a book's inner life and might as well not have begun. Sometimes, when he unavoidably had to miss a day, he would go back and begin all over again, rather than be nagged by his sense that he was wronging a serious author.

Their naive fucking impertinence about carnal lusting! Seducer of the young. Socrates, Strindberg, and me.

La gente non legge pensando all'arte: legge pensando alle persone. E le giudica per quello che sono. E come credi che giudicherà i personaggi del tuo racconto? A quali conclusioni credi che arriverà? Ci hai pensato?

The pride inspired in my parents by the establishment in 1948 of a homeland in Palestine that would gather in the unmurdered remnant of European Jewry was, in fact, not so unlike what welled up in me when I first came upon Lonoff's thwarted, secretive, imprisoned souls, and realized that out of everything humbling from which my own striving, troubled father had labored to elevate us all, a literature of such dour wit and poignancy could be shamelessly conceived.

The only patient being treated by the writer is himself

All of European literature springs from a fight.

So I said, and quickly reached for my glass so as to duck my disingenuous face and take a bitter drop of brandy on my tongue. But Lonoff had read my designing mind, all right; for when I came upon Babel's description of the Jewish writer as a man with autumn in his heart and spectacles on his nose, I had been inspired to add, "and blood in his penis," and had then recorded the words like a challenge—a flaming Dedalian formula to ignite my soul's smithy.

Da professore di letteratura fervidamente coscienzioso qual ero, ho sempre gradito finire l'ora con qualcosa di commovente che gli studenti potessero portare con sè dalla classe incontaminata, fuori, nel mondo corrotto di stuzzichini preconfezionati e pop star e droga.

In a review of the relevant literature it is shown that happiness is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system.

Rascal Knockoff. I thought: Dostoyevsky fell in love with him.

We are people who fantasize too much to begin with. We read too much, we feel too much, we fantasize too much - we want all the wrong things!

Mishima. Rothko. Hemingway. Berryman. Koestler. Pavese. Kosinski. Arshile Gorky. Primo Levi. Hart Crane. Walter Benjamin. Peerless bunch. Nothing dishonorable signing on there.

The motive for writing serious literature is to write serious literature. You want to rebel against society? I'll tell you how to do it - write well .

Lev-en-thal to Le-vov! Lev-en-thal to Le-vov!" was an anapest

The professors are always schlepping in Swift to defend some farsbtunkeneh nobody.

Lewis was studying literary history with the present and future in mind.

Lewis was "the best read man of his generation, one who read everything and remembered everything he read

iI you are a reader you are already half-way to being a writer -for you have a love of words and a pleasure from seeing them on a page.

poet Józef Wittlin inquired in 1946.

Derrida s'intéressait moins au roman qu'à l'écriture, et ce qui l'a fasciné c'est le fait que j'ai fait de l'écriture un roman.

Barthes me lisait, donc on s'est rencontrés.

We were supposed to be an English literature class, but Miss Nesbitt used literature to teach real life. She said she didn't have time to teach us like a regular English teacher--we were too far behind. Instead, she taught us the world through literature.

There's a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them.