Quotes About Literature

They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.

Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you?

My father always insisted that Persians basically did not have a home, except in their literature, especially their poetry. This country, our country, he would say, has been attacked and invaded numerous times, and each time, when Persians had lost their sense of their own history, culture and language, they found their poets as the true guardians of their true home." - Foreword by Azar Nafisi

Interesse für Kunst oder Literatur hat stets, ob bewusst oder unbewusst, auch damit zu tun, dass man das Selbst aufwertet, indem man sich von jenen abgrenzt, die keinen Zugang zu solchen Dingen haben; es handelt sich um eine Distinktion, einen Unterschied im Sinne einer Kluft, die konstitutiv ist für das Selbst und die Art, wie man sich selbst sieht, und zwar immer im Vergleich zu den anderen - den bildungsfernen oder unteren Schichten etwa.

But some characters in books are really real--Jane Austen's are; and I know those five Bennets at the opening of Pride and Prejudice, simply waiting to raven the young men at Netherfield Park, are not giving one thought to the real facts of marriage.

Certain unique books seem to be without forerunners or successors as far as their authors are concerned. Even though they may profoundly influence the work of other writers, for their creator they're complete, not leading anywhere.

I get the feeling I do on finishing a novel with a brick-wall happy ending - I mean the kind of ending when you never think any more about the characters.

and a large, muscular male cat with humanoid features discuss

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.

I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was, the son who spites his father by reading such books.

Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure.

Remember literature, Charlie? It involved getting drunk and getting laid.

I drove all night, northeast, and once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days, the archetypes of the dismal mystery, sons and daughters of the archetypes, images that could not be certain which of two confusions held less terror, their own or what their own might become if it ever faced the truth. I drove at insane speeds.

I like your mother. You have your mother's breasts. Her breasts. Great stand-up tits. he said

The novel is a fucking killer. I try to show it every respect.

But I wanted to read it now, I needed it now, even if I knew I'd never finish. I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was

Brita said, 'I read at home, I read in hotels, I take a book with me on a twenty-minute trip to the dentist. Then I read in the waiting room.

But then it came time for me to make my journey—into America. [... N]o coincidence that my first novel is called Americana . That became my subject, the subject that shaped my work. When I get a French translation of one of my books that says 'translated from the American', I think, 'Yes, that's exactly right.

I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.

I will read," she said. "But I don't want you to choose anything that has men inside women, quote-quote, or men entering women. 'I entered her.' 'He entered me.' We're not lobbies or elevators. 'I wanted him inside me,' as if he could crawl completely in, sign the register, sleep, eat, so forth. Can we agree on that? I don't care what these people do as long as they don't enter or get entered.

We have a rich literature. But sometimes it's a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We're all one beat away from becoming elevator music.

Popular Mechanics, Iowa

Too many people, once they reach a comfortable position in life, forget the important role writers like Hammett — who dropped out of high school in his first year to work supporting his family — or Howard — struggling to break into the pulps with absolutely no professional advice and little encouragement — play in literature, just as they tend to ignore the role the working man and woman play in society.