Quotes About Literature

the memoir-novel "dumbed down fiction and traduced

it insisted to her that she was a writer, when perhaps she was only a sensitive and loving reader, a lover of literature who thought she wanted to write. I think it was the writing that killed Lilly, because writing can do that. It just burned her up; she wasn't big enough to take the self-abuse of it, to take the constant chipping away – of herself.

As a novelist, he was a little fussy about chronological order, a tad old-fashioned.)

His exposure to storytelling, through Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte, had ill prepared him for characters who came from and traveled nowhere -- or for stories that made no sense.

Women readers kept fiction alive—here was another one.

And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it, -perhaps your favorite sentence- to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that perhaps moved you to tears.

What makes the first sentence of A Prayer for Owen Meany such a good one is that the whole novel is contained in it.

I really like the sex in your novels," Dorothy told him. "I like how you do it." "I like it better," Miriam said to him, giving her daughter an all-knowing look. "I have the perspective to know what really bad sex is," Dorothy's mom told her. "Please, Mother—don't paint us a picture," Dorothy said.

È un buon segno piangere per un romanzo» mi assicurò Miss Frost. «Un buon segno?» «Significa che hai più cuore della maggior parte dei tuoi coetanei.»

It's like reading a bad newspaper or a bad piece in a magazine. (on Tom Wolfe)

book is always in motion – from the general to the specific, from the particular to the whole, and back again. Good reading

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

Wit isn't tentative; therefore, neither is it young. Wit is one of many aspects of life and literature that is far easier to recognize onstage than in a book. My students are always missing the wit in what they read, or else they do not trust it; onstage, even an amateur actor can make anyone see what wit is.

Then the snowshoer explained how he never drove anywhere in the beetle without what he called an emergency novel. If I drive off the road and am lying upside down in a ditch, unable to move my legs or get out of the car, I want to have something good to read. ? John Irving, The Last Chairlift

She told all the would-be biographers, exactly as he would have, "Read the work. Forget the life.

Robertson Davies

Defoe's Moll Flanders, Fielding's Tom Jones and Johnson's moralizing fable, Rasselas.

Pop used to say he hated to take time from books to earn a living. Man's never lonely with a book in his pocket, he'd say. Books gives a man ten thousand friends. Some are smart, some are funny, some are just pleasant for passing the time, but they're all good.

My chest of books divide amongst my friends--

I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a Poem and to be given away by a Novel.

it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but, most important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Fine writing, next to doing nothing, is the best thing in the world.

Shakespeare permeated his whole being, and his influence is to be detected not in a resemblance of style, for Shakespeare can have no imitators, but in a broadening view of life, and increased humanity.