Literary Conversation Quotes

The reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the noblest men of past centuries who were the authors of them, nay a carefully studied conversation, in which they reveal to us none but the best of their thoughts.

He pointed the gun at me. Then he looked up at my hand & tilted his head slightly. - Journey, he said. I had forgotten I was still holding the book. - Céline, I said back in a whisper. - I love that book. - I'm only halfway through. - Have you got to the point where -- - Hey, kill me, but don't tell me the end!

A book is always a dialogue with other readers and other books.

I'm a writer because I love reading. I love the conversation between a reader and a writer, and that it all takes place in a book-sort of a neutral ground. A writer puts down the words, and a reader interprets the words, and every reader will read a book differently. I love that.

I think a lot of readers are looking for a book they can talk about.

I often derive a peculiar satisfaction in conversing with the ancient and modern dead, — who yet live and speak excellently in their works. My neighbors think me often alone, — and yet at such times I am in company with more than five hundred mutes — each of whom, at my pleasure, communicates his ideas to me by dumb signs — quite as intelligently as any person living can do by uttering of words.

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.

You know you're going to have a good day when your morning begins with breakfast in the same room as Carrie Tiffany, David Vann and Lionel Shriver.

In 'Open City,' there is a passage that any reader of Joyce will immediately recognise as a very close, formal analogue of one the stories in 'Dubliners.' That is because a novel is also a literary conversation.

Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?

It seems to me that in literature, books have always been answers to other books.