Best 5099 quotes in «literature quotes» category

I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature.

I consciously try to end my novels at a point where I won't have to wonder about my characters ever again.

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know.

I could, as a free man, look across the bay toward the Eastern Shore where I was born a slave.

I could be a bit of a pain in the arse. Since I've come out of my cancer, I must say I intend to be even more of a pain in the arse.

I could not live by literature if only to begin with, because of the slow maturing of my work and its special character.

I couldn't imagine any other way of living, outside of books, outside my work. Which doesn't mean I am not interested in other things, of course - I am interested in many things. But the center, the crux, is always literature.

I couldn't see myself filling some definite niche in what is called a career. This was all misty.

I could undertake to be an efficient pupil if it were possible to find an efficient teacher.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

I'd always liked to read, but when I picked up books I wasn't getting the same kind of excitement from them that I was from going out clubbing. I wanted to get the same kind of feel.

Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

I defend both the freedom of expression and society's right to counter it. I must pay the price for differing. It is the natural way of things.

I decided to write category romance as I'd recently discovered them, and enjoyed them.

Ideology has shaped the very sofa on which I sit.

I describe not men, but manners; not an individual, but a species.

I did it at night because I loved it. I never did it to make money, as a job. I just did it because I had to.

I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.

I did my homework, of course, by inhaling as much literature as was available to find, so that when it was time to shoot I could hopefully exhale [ Harriet Tubman ].

I did my BA in English lit, and hated the restriction - I'd always read more in translation than not; coming from a working-class background, what I knew of as British literature - the writers who made big prize lists and/or were stocked in WH Smith, Doncaster's only bookshop until I was 17 - seemed incredibly, alienatingly middle-class. Then in 2009, just after the financial crash, I graduated with no more specific skill than 'can analyse a bit of poetry'.

I didn't choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to the place.

I did not want to be depressed by the gap existing between my weakness and my ambition.

I did not know I was in my prime until afterwards.

I didn't ever consider poetry the province exclusively of English and American literature and I discovered a great amount in reading Polish poetry and other Eastern European poetry and reading Russian poetry and reading Latin American and Spanish poetry and I've always found models in those other poetries of poets who could help me on my path.

I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else.

I didn't mind being unpopular at school, because everyone else was a heathen.

I didn't see many female politicians on TV. I didn't see women in history textbooks, so I did geography, and art and English literature. But I know I must have been affected by not seeing women represented.

I did study Shakespeare, that was sort of my thing; I got a Literature A-level, which is my only claim to academic fame.

I did several interesting jobs, working in restaurants, I worked at a lab rat farm, feeding and watering all these rats. Then I got a full-time job as a technical writer for a large scientific research laboratory.

Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.

Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.

I do believe any hero is a person that can be knocked down. A failure isn't a person who gets knocked down; a failure is a person who stays down, and to me, the great heroes take the beating, get knocked down and stand back up again. Perseus is defined as one of the great heroes in literature, so you gotta take that on board.

I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.

I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that Nature with which I am acquainted.

I do like to live in other people's homes. I enjoy being a guest. I am an inexpensive guest. When one lives in another's home he can enter into the psychic kingdom of that person.

I do not believe in guilt, moderation or dull pencils.

I do not say a proverb is amiss when aptly and reasonably applied, but to be forever discharging them, right or wrong, hit or miss, renders conversation insipid and vulgar.

I don't back down. I don't cave when the pressure gets too great from these partisan political ideological forces.

I do not read the ancient languages, but I am beginning to study Greek.

I don't believe for one moment you can write well what you wouldn't read for pleasure.

I do not write for the public. You are my public and I hope to convert you.

I don't accept the idea that literature can be just entertainment and that there is no consequences of literature in the real world.

I don't base any character on a real person, and really don't do composites either. I make them up.

I don't believe in low-fat cooking.

I don't fret over lost time - I can always use the situations in a novel.

I don't care very much for literary shrines and hauntsI knew a woman in London who boasted that she had lodgings from the windows of which she could throw a stone into Carlyle's yard. And when I said, "Why throw a stone into Carlyle's yard?" she looked at me as if I were an imbecile and changed the subject.

I don't care what they do with my book so long as the flippin check clears.

I don't go to concerts much. I've heard everything. When I do go to movies, I walk out half the time. As for literature, I've read everything.