Quotes About Literature

this whole scene of me lying in bed and reading books would drive my mother to fits of anger, for she was sure it meant I was doomed to a life of slothfulness, but as it turned out, I was only doomed to write books other people might read.

Hume declared that 'Our connection with each other, as men of letters, is greater than our differences as adhering to different sects or systems'. 'Let us', he continued, 'revive the happy times, when Atticus and Cassius the Epicureans, Cicero the Academic, and Brutus the Stoic, could, all of them, live in unreserved friendship together, and were insensible to all those distinctions, except so far as they furnished matter to discourse and conversation'.

The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.

Every act of reading is an act of forgetting: the experience of reading is a palimpsest, in which each text partially covers those that came before. Those books that allow us to forget the most are accorded he authority of the classic.

You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way ... people look at reality, then you can change it.

Third, in coming to understand Biblical symbolism, we may receive some clues from other ancient literature, but we must always have clear-cut Biblical indication for any symbol or image we think we have found. We don't want to read the modern secular worldview into the Bible, but we don't want to read the corrupt worldview of ancient Near-Eastern paganism into it either.

Tell me," Big Angel said. "Did I do anything good in your life?" "You gave me the books." It was instantaneous. "Yes. All the books--that was pretty good. I gave you good ones." "And bad ones." "True. But all books are good, man. Imagine no books.

Me decía: ¡habrían tenido que hacerme leer a Sade antes que todas las demás cosas!

No obstante, los Noailles me escribieron para preguntarme si no podría encontrar algún trabajo interesante para Aldous Huxley. ¡Deliciosa ingenuidad!

Today`s culture is unfortunately inseparable from economic and military power. A ruling nation can impose its culture and give a worldwide fame to a second-rate writer like (Ernest Hemingway). (John Steinbeck) is important due to American guns. Had (John Dos Passos) and (William Faulkner) been born in Paraguay or in Turkey, who`d read them?

O Jorge Luis Borges dizia que o escritor publica seus livros para livrar-se deles, para não ficar reescrevendo-os ao infinito. Mas Borges, que nunca fez um texto muito longo, foi um grande exemplo de quem sempre soube onde parar.

He finds the idea of someone wanting to be paid as well as published a particularly repulsive, almost obscene form of literary pretension.

Y de mis autores más queridos, a los que vengo leyendo y releyendo desde hace tantos años? ¿Qué podría decir yo de Cervantes, de Kafka, de Shakespeare, de Dickens, de Faulkner, de Conrad, de Chéjov, de Borges, de Quevedo...? Apenas nada. Ni siquiera me he parado a pensar en ello.

I hated myself and the world because I had failed to face and accept the limitations of my self and of life. In literature this refusal is called romanticism; in psychology, neurosis.

I suppose that literature as it is won't die, science fiction included. But games are becoming an extremely important part of the science fiction world, including games that are adapted from books (or vice versa: books that are adapted from games). It's wonderful to have the opportunity to play and see your favorite characters on the screen, but the opportunity to read a book does not become less attractive.

The book breathless is so sad but at the begging it is happy and the part that I'm at is sad because the guy that has cancer he wants to kill his self it is so sad I just kind of like it right know but it is sad to me and when I make kids read it when I have kids it will be so cool.

Le botteghe degli stampatori mi hanno sempre attirato. I libri hanno un fascino particolare.

How should you read? What should the diet of your reading be? Read the best writers from all different periods; keep your reading of contemporaries in proportion—you do not want a steady diet of contemporary literature. You already belong to your time.

Of course, any book, and any piece of writing, is already part of a cooperative. It is, in itself as printed on the page, incomplete. It requires a reader to complete it. But the reader may also misunderstand it, distort it in favor of another idea, forget large parts of it, misremember it, create something different in misremembering it, etc. All these responses are perfectly legitimate parts of the cooperative act.

But in the case of the novel by Perec, who has no fewer than four e's in his own name, the deliberate elimination of the e was perhaps not just a conceptual antic but had an emotional source and an emotional effect.

Read the best writers from all different periods; keep your reading of contemporaries in proportion - you do not want a steady diet of contemporary literature. You already belong to your time.

But at other times, I sit here reading in the afternoon, a myrtle in my buttonhole, and there are such beautiful passages in the book that I think I have become beautiful myself.

ho notato che nelle lettere le menzogne scaturiscono e proliferano in maniera quasi naturale, come nei romanzi.

ô literatura! Por que as coisas nos parecem sempre belas quando protegidas pela distância?