Joseph Heller Quotes

Literature is capable of being a subject that people want to catch up on or discuss, whether at a coffee shop or a watercooler. It can become an intrinsic part of their dialogue.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

The two most common charges against the older fiction, that it pleased wickedly and that it taught nothing, had broken down before the discovery, except in illiberal sects, that the novel is fitted both for honest use and for pleasure.

My whole thing is that I want to explore why you read books, what's the purpose of reading, and maybe that it's not that cool to hate something just because it's popular.

Those who do not read criticism will rarely merit to be criticised.

I'm nothing if not a literary hedonist.

I have spent more time with other people's books than with my own. I do not regret it.

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.

My twenties were entirely taken up with literature. Entirely.

No one who loves life can ignore literature, and no one who loves literature can ignore life.

I guess the important thing for young writers is to read.

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

If you can't really have a conversation with someone candidly about it it's something that you'll always have something to learn from when it comes to taking a literature class.

It is no more expected of most producers to read a book than it is, say, of Ted Williams to dust off home plate.

I wouldn't call myself a 'literary critic,' just a book reviewer.

A book may be compared to your neighbour: if it be good it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

As a bookish adolescent, I sopped up texts as if I were blotting paper and they were fluid.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust.

I did the traditional thing with falling in love with words, reading books and underlining lines I liked and words I didn't know. It was something I always did.

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

Lovers of literature will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism.

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

I'd love to get my teeth into Shakespeare.

Your failure to enjoy a highly rated novel doesn't mean you're dim - you may find that Graham Greene is more to your taste, or Stephen Hawking or Iris Murdoch or Ian Rankin. Dickens, Stephen King, whoever.