Quotes About Literature

That perfect tranquillity of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend and a good library

The people who are always monkeying with these great books to make them fully (comprehensible) have no friend in me, for in their realm the fully comprehensible is not worth comprehending

The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.

Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen.

Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.

Personally, I'd never seen a graphic novel. I knew they existed because friends of mine like Jonathan Ross collect them and some very literate and intelligent people really rate the graphic novel as a form.

Books should, not Business, entertain the Light; And Sleep, as undisturb'd as Death, the Night.

For five hundred years after Walther's death - until Goethe - no German lyric poet was his equal.

I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.

Tolkien made the wrong choice when he brought Gandalf back. Screw Gandalf. He had a great death and the characters should have had to go on without him.

"Literature" is written material that, 100 years after the death of the author, is forced upon high school students.

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.", The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]

I won't be sad too often, If they bury me in the libraryWith bookworms in my coffin.

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarna

I've deprived my family in order to buy books. No doubt there is a special punishment in hell for such self-indulgence. Perhaps I shall be struck with blindness among the rarest known to men.

As thoroughly as mankind has killed God, the reader has despatched the author.

Laughter and books and wine are holy things

Typography is to literature as musical performance is to composition: an essential act of interpretation, full of endless opportunities for insight or obtuseness.

The name of a great writer is usually bigger than the title of his book. Both literally and figuratively.

Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.

An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

To read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another

My first reading of Tolstoy affected me as a revelation from heaven, as the trumpet of the judgment. What he made me feel was notthe desire to imitate, but the conviction that imitation was futile.