literary charm Quotes

I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling.

Norbert Blei is a writer the way people used to be troubadours and minstrels, celebrating what he has seen and heart and felt in a deceptively simple style reminiscent of the early Sherwood Anderson. . . . Like Anderson, he is a lover, and his affection invests his writing with a singular charm.

When trying to seduce a woman, a writer says: 'I'm a writer', and scribbles a poem on a napkin. It always works.

O goddess, bestow on my words an immortal charm.

Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig.

Breezy, sophisticated, hilarious, rude and aching with sweetness: LOVE, NINA might be the most charming book I've ever read.

Without grace no book can live, and with it the poorest may have its life prolonged.

The books that charmed us in youth recall the delight ever afterwards; we are hardly persuaded there are any like them, any deserving our equal affections.

In most writers, style is a welcome, an invitation, a letting down of the drawbridge between the artist and the world. Shaw had no time for such ruses. Unlike most of his countrymen, he abominated charm, which he regarded as evidence of chronic temperamental weakness.

Digressions incontestably are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading.

Great is bookishness and the charm of books.

Without charm there can be no fine literature, as there can be no perfect flower without fragrance.

No furniture is so charming as books.

A pretty sight, a lady with a book.

When we see a natural style, we are astonished and charmed; for we expected to see an author, and we find a person.

The feminine graces of Madame de Sevigne's genius are exquisitely charming; but the philosophy and eloquence of Madame de Stael are above the distinction of sex.

Every reader has found charms by which to secure possession of a page that, by magic, becomes as if never read before, fresh and immaculate.