Quotes About Literature

We didn't have television in those days, and many people didn't even have radios. My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening.

Every author has to eventually write a food book.

I read to my kids every night.

The book is my favorites.

I left with a heavy heart and a still heavier suitcase--I had filled it with my favourite books.

A leitura é como que uma droga que confere um adormecimento agradável aos contornos da crueldade da vida.

Des quantités de livres dorment ainsi en moi, des bons et des mauvais, de tout genre. Des phrases, des mots, des alinéas et des vers qui, pareils à des locataires remuants, reviennent brusquement à la vie, errent solitaires ou entament dans ma tête de bruyants bavardages que je suis incapable de faire taire.

La lecture est comme une drogue qui confère un agréable flou au cruels contours de la vie.

We needed no Shakespeare to feel -- though, perhaps, like the rest of the world, we needed him to express it.

Reading is a vice which can replace all other vices or temporarily take their place in more intensely helping people live, it is a debauchery, a consuming addiction. No, I don't take any drugs, I take books.

Damals fing ich auch an, alles was ich las, entstellt zu lesen. Wenn irgendwo stand >Sommermoden<, habe ich gelesen >Sommermorde<. [...] Die neuen Wintermorde sind angekommen, sie werden schon in den wichtigsten Mordhäusern vorgeführt.

I know the first film I ever saw it must have been some time in 1924, when I was six or so... was Black Beauty. About a stallion. I still recall a sequence with fire. It was burning, I remember that vividly. And I remember too how it excited me, and how afterwards we bought the book of Black Beauty and how I learned the chapter on the fire by heart at that time I still hadn't learned to read.

I want to stop. I want to stay on Fårö, and read the books I haven't read, find out things I haven't yet found out. I want to write things I haven't written. To listen to music, and talk to my neighbors. To live together with my wife a very calm, very secure, very lazy existence, for the rest of my life.

Quand je lis quelque chose je suis frappée tout de suite par peut-être une certaine vérité dedans n'est ce pas ? Quelque chose de sincère, et c'est pas nécessaire que c'est tragique ou un drame ca peut être aussi une comédie mais il faut avoir quelque chose de vraie.

These two sections [of Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise], plus some of the author's notes, are all we have -- this in itself is a tragedy and waste of war. Had this novel been finished we would be hailing it as one of the supreme works of literature. As it stands, it is like a great cathedral gutted by a bomb. The ruined shell still soars to heaven, a reminder of the human spirit triumphing despite human destructiveness.

For God's sake, even her parents no longer read Dostoyevsky--haven't they suffered enough, they would say; after thirty years of communism, didn't they DESERVE Danielle Steele?

Books are the ultimate way for writers to reach immortality.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.

The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.

If writers were good business men, they'd have too much sense to be writers.

There's all this stuff that is happening in Edinburgh now, it's a sad attempt to create an Edinburgh society, similar to a London society, a highbrow literature celebrity society.

If you believe that no one was ever corrupted by a book, you have also to believe that no one was ever improved by a book.

There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books.