Quotes About Literature

Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either. (Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews , Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)

Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.

A novelist is a doctor who sees only terminal cases.

The day women stop reading—that's the day the novel dies!

the single ingredient in American literature that distinguishes it from other literatures of the world is a kind of giddy, illogical hopefulness. It is quite technically sophisticated while remaining ideologically naïve.

There's nothing I need or want to know from the writers I admire that isn't in their books. It's better to read a good writer than meet one.

You should wait, William, Miss Frost said. The time to read Madame Bovary is when your romantic hopes and desires have crashed, and you believe that your future relationships will have disappointing - even devastating - consequences.

It was quality that killed Lilly; it was the end of The Great Gatsby, which was not her ending, which was not an ending within her grasp.

On his bedside table, between the reading lamp and the telephone, was his battered copy of David Copperfield. Homer didn't have to open the book to know how the story began. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show, he recited from memory.

A novel is always more complicated than it seems at the beginning. Indeed a novel should be more complicated than it seems at the beginning.

good books were the best protection from evil that Pepe had actually held in his hands—you could not hold faith in Jesus in your hands, not in quite the same way you could hold good books.

It was as if all the books in her room had been feeding on her, had consumed – not nourished – her.

In schools—even in good schools, like Exeter—they tend to teach the shorter books by the great authors; at least they begin with those. Thus it was Billy Budd, Sailor that introduced me to Melville, which led me to the library, where I discovered Moby Dick on my own.

First chapter ain't so bad, Jillsy said. That first chapter ain't nothin'. It's that nineteenth chapter that got me, Jillsy said. Lawd, Lawd! she crowed. You read nineteen chapters? John Wolf asked. You didn't give me no more than nineteen chapters, Jillsy said. Jesus Lawd, is there another chapter? Do they keep goin' on? No, no, John Wolf said. that's the end of it. That's all there is.

Good night you Kings of New England. You Princes of Maine. Who knows what book this quote comes from?

The operas I loved were nineteenth-century novels!

Nana never remembered where you stopped reading, and wherever you started Moby-Dick, Mildred Brewster knew exactly where she was in the story. What my grandmother didn't know was where she was in her own story.

Le romancier est comme un médecin qui ne s'occuperait que des incurables. Et nous sommes tous des incurables.

It was Owen Meany who taught me that any good book is always in motion—from the general to the specific, from the particular to the whole, and back again. Good reading—and good writing about reading—moves the same way.

Reading good novels can make almost anything seem imaginable

Murder, more murders, still more murders! The Germans take murder more seriously than we do—I mean, as literature," Uncle Johan explained

Grown-ups shouldn't finish books they're not enjoying.

Good evening, knocked-up faculty daughter. How are you managing now, you smelly little slut?

Writers simply have to accept readers who prefer other writers.