Best 5099 quotes in «literature quotes» category

I have never been able to look upon America as young and vital but rather as prematurely old, as a fruit which rotted before it had a chance to ripen.

I have never considered myself a poet. Therefore, I am not a rival of anyone, and I do not consider anybody my rival.

I have no ambition to surprise my reader. Castles with unknown passages are not compatible with my homely muse.

I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

I have never seen an ass who talked like a human being, but I have met many human beings who talked like asses.

I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.

I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.

I have nothing but wastes and wilds of self-translation before me for many miserable months to come.

I have often noticed that a bribe has that effect - it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman.

I haven't been the kind of writer about whom book-length academic studies have been written.

I haven't had that good a time in ages. Since September 11, really. I just felt so happy, it was like the sun came out of the clouds for me. I love Italy.

I have often noticed that ancestors never boast of the descendants who boast of ancestors. I would rather start a family than finish one. Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.

I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.

I have respect for literature. If he found the words, if she found the words - this is a book!

I have somewhere met with the epitaph on a charitable man which has pleased me very much. I cannot recollect the words, but here is the sense of it: 'What I spent I lost; what I possessed is left to others; what I gave away remains with me.'

I have the fault of being a little more sincere than is proper.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offense. ... Everyone who contributes to the 'too much' of literature is doing grave social injury.

I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.

I have the same confidence in the ability of our people to reject noxious literature as I have in their capacity to sort out the true from the false in theology, economics, or any other field.

I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.

I have to admit that when I watch a movie in which there is no moral context for the violence - I find that offensive. I think that's potentially damaging to society.

I have to believe that literature can effect change; otherwise, I would have no purpose in my life and would have wasted four years on Ilustrado.

I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.

I have watchedmany literary fashions shoot up and blossom, and then fade and drop.... Yet with the many that I have seen comeand go, I have never yet encountered a mode of thinking that regarded itself as simply a changing fashion, and not as an infallible approach to the right culture.

I have written every one of my novels to convince somebody of something.

I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.

I hold that gentleman to be the best-dressed whose dress no one observes.

I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.

I just wish we knew a little less about his urethra and a little more about his arms sales to Iran.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams.

I know not everyone starts out reading high literature. If you read enough you might be drawn to some other things, so maybe those vampire books are what they call 'gateway books.' I just coined that term. I don't know if there's a thing called 'gateway books.

I know of no better name than Anarchism.

I know that a translation of a work of literature is like playing a violin concerto on the piano. You can do this. You can do this very successfully on one strict condition: never try to force the piano to produce the sounds of the violin. This will be grotesque.

I learned a lot of things about literature talking to people at the publishing company. Did you know that about 90 percent of celebrity autobiographies are ghostwritten?

Iliad by Homer is one of the great stories in literature. And I thought its themes really resonated today, whether that was my projection or Homer's intentions. It didn't seem like we had come very far.

I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into.

I like European and South American literature, but mostly I read nonfiction.

I like literature that you respond to in some way. You laugh, you cry, you turn the light on - that's great, it's eliciting a response by proxy.

I like to think the price I paid by being open about my private life helped.

I like poetry, but honestly, I like dramatic literature more. If I had to pick between Rumi and Dostoevsky, I would pick Dostoevsky without even thinking about it. Ninety-nine out of 100 Iranians would probably pick Rumi. Kiarostami, too, would probably pick Rumi first. I try to have the meaning be in the action of the story, not in the symbolism. I want it to be in the action, and it's dramatic action that creates the meaning.

I long for typical days, but rarely get them any more.

I lived in the studio apartment that I bought for four years before I bought it in 1989, so I was already in it. I began living there in 1985, so I've had the same address and phone number since then.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

I love and care about literature, and great writers are our teachers. You're studying their mind when you read their work.

I love food. I mean, I really love food. I take pictures of my finest, funniest and most fascinating dishes, post them on Twitter, and send them to friends. I treat menus like classic literature, refusing to skip even one word. I read the description of every item, regardless of whether or not I'm interested in eating it.

I loved writing a book in which, in some ways, it's very, very classical, and in some ways I'm breaking lots of rules about what you can do and what you can't do.

I loved English literature - if didn't it would have been hard - but I had to learn it myself. I remembered ways to repeat words, to put more emphasis on certain lines.

I loved everything. I read everything. Art and poetry and literature and trash and sci fi. I didn't know what I would become yet and I needed to read to figure it out.

I love literature, the English language and storytelling. I also have thirty horses and seventy foxhounds to feed.

I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much.