Best 5099 quotes in «literature quotes» category

Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

In true prose everything must be underlined.

Invention is the talent of youth, as judgment is of age.

I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.

I often heard about his cases and I often sat in on his trials. In the late 1960s when I was growing up I wanted to be a crusader like him but I didn't want to wear a suit and commute.

I often say I've spent more time with photography than I have with literature just in terms of hours.

I often think that eventually I'd love to do some papers... my correspondence if life calms down a bit, but I think I'd do history or English literature... I've had enough of journos.

I once bought an old car back after I sold it because I missed it so much and I had forgotten that it never ran. It was a British racing car. You know, because I just wanted it back. I could only remember what was good about it

I only keep books that I like very much. Otherwise I'd throw them out.

I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.

I personally was driven to be an actor for the love of telling a story. It was very closely linked to being a reader as a kid and being transported by literature and art. It had nothing - zero - to do with anything resembling fame.

I prefer being wrong in my own way to being right in someone else's.

I prefer the folly of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.

I prefer to talk about the gift of literature rather than its role or task.

I probably have a 20,000-word vocabulary. I'll match my wits with anyone on literature, science and the arts.

I reach my readers regardless of what the critics have written

I rarely ever put my head above the rampart and see where this big lumbering behemoth called 'global literature' is going.

I rarely read or buy a book because of a review.

I read all the time... I read a lot of history books.

I read less and less. I have not forgiven books for their failure to tell me the truth and make me happy.

I read recently that the problem with stereotypes isn't that they are inaccurate, but that they're incomplete. And this captures perfectly what I think about contemporary African literature. The problem isn't that it's inaccurate, it's that it's incomplete.

I read Russian literature a lot.

I realize that I'm generalizing here, but as is often the case when I generalize, I don't care.

I really, really wanted to write. I loved language. I loved literature. I loved reading. I never read a foreign language, I'm afraid, but I loved Flaubert. I loved the 19th-century classics. I love Thomas Hardy. I wanted to be a goof on a bus, but I wanted to write more.

I recently did the David Letterman Show about my book. He was very serious and made no jokes and it caught me off guard a little bit. He was much more serious than some of the joke shows that journalists get on.

I really wouldn't call a lot of what's online "literature" since that word, to me, refers to a sub-genre of writing that belongs to the heavy-hitters, the canonical writers, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and even Toni Morrison, George Saunders, Thomas Bernhard, Sebald, Borges, DFW, e.g.

I receive about 10,000 letters a year from readers, and in the first year after a book is published, perhaps 5,000 letters will deal specifically with that piece of work.

Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.

I regretted making a comment about Dave Eggers. I’ve never said anything about McSweeneys except that I admire what it is, and I think it’s great that they keep people interested in literature.

I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.

I remember a moment when the Prince went back to his old school, Grammar School in Melbourne, and slightly to his horror his old music teacher produced a cello.

I remember being in the public library and my jaw just aching as I looked around at all those books I wanted to read. There just wasn't time enough to read everything I wanted to read.

Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.

Isaac Singer was born in Poland and doesn't write in English. Still, he's an American.

I said I have no powers of invention. Well, I also have no powers of mimicry.

I sailed through my childhood with a complete lack of any drama.

I say you must not win an unjust case by oaths.

Is all literature eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our body borrowed, like a beggar’s dinner, from a hundred charities?

I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.

I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.

I see no reason in morality, why literature should not have as one of its intentions the arousing of thoughts of lust. It is one of the effects, perhaps one of the functions of literature to arouse desire, and I can discover no grounds for saying that sexual pleasure should not be among the objects of desire which literature presents to us, along with heroism, virtue, peace, death, food, wisdom, God, etc.

I saw within Its depth how It conceives All things in a single volume bound by Love of which the universe is the scattered leaves.

I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral.

I should be very willing to redress men wrongs, and rather check than punish crimes, had not Cervantes, in that all too true tale of Quixote, shown how all such efforts fail.

I soon realized that a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads: The most conscientous student will be continually misconstruing the implications, even the meaning.

Is it strange, then, that in a literature so concerned with realism and with personal liberation this refusal and impoverishment of the life of the spirit have always nourished the screamers, the eccentrics, the pseudo-Whitmans, the calculating terrorists?

Islamic myths are mostly actually plagiarized from the Christian ones, both biblically and in terms of modern creationism. If you read Islamic creationist literature, it's pretty much lifted from American evangelical literature.

I specialize in murders of quiet, domestic interest.

I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.