Quotes About Literature

Credits Cover art © 2004 by Jim Paillot.

The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them." —Mark Twain

books were not only important, they were also objects of beauty.

In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.

Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.

I read for pleasure,' wrote Margaret Atwood, 'and that is the moment at which I learn most. Subliminal learning.

Science fiction is the agent provocateur of literature.

People who read are never strangers.

Ultimately, it will help ensure that more of what you like to read will be written. Thank you.

ALSO BY DANA STABENOW

loading a plate with steak and bread and a slab of meatloaf as thick as a Diana Gabaldon novel

He'd found her weeping one day the previous week, huddled over a much-thumbed copy of a mystery, one of a series. In this one the heroine's lover had died. She took it as a personal affront—"I can't believe she did that! How could she do that?"—and threw the book across the room, only to retrieve it a moment later and force him to listen to her read the death scene out loud.

Issue de la mélancolie, la littérature en est l'accomplissement et l'achèvement. C'est par la mélancolie qu'on entre en littérature. C'est par la littérature qu'on sort de la mélancolie.

But I also think I have never seen it in a book—the thing I needed to read, just then, and this feeling makes me agitated and restless: it makes me want to write the book where someone could find the thing I needed to read in the last seven or eight years.

I read more than Mandy Lethbridge, and Im faster at it too.

Amos Oz, who would become one of Israel's greatest novelists and was several times considered a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature, later recalled that night in his autobiographical memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness. He told how, merely eight years old, he rode on his father's shoulders in a surging crowd of celebrants in Jerusalem, and at three or four in the morning, still wearing his dirty clothes, crawled into bed.

One of the most enduring scenes in American literature offers an important lesson in human motivation. In Chapter 2 of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tom faces the dreary task of whitewashing Aunt Polly's 810-square-foot fence. He's not

As a kid I wanted to write science fiction, and I was never without a book. Later I really got into being a scientist and never thought I'd be writing novels.

The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.

A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you.

The first forms of writing emerged not for art, literature, or love, not for spiritual or liturgical purposes, but for business—all literature could be said to originate from sales receipts (sorry).

But one mystery has not been solved: the mystery of the human brain and how it gives rise to thoughts and feelings, hopes and desires, love, and the experience of beauty, not to mention dance, visual art, literature, and music.

Many fields have explored the nature of mental life—from psychology to philosophy, literature

I think art, especially literature, has the particular power to immerse the viewer or reader into another world. This is especially powerful in literature, when a reader lives the experience of the characters. So if the characters are human and real enough, then readers will feel empathy for them.