literary effect Quotes

Reading a great book causes jolts and frights.

Good literature makes your head throb heartlike

If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins.

Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us.

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.

If we weigh the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great children's books suddenly turn up very high on the list.

Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress.

No poetry that I'm aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it.

I think that fiction has a certain power.

Reading [poetry], you know, is rather like opening the door to a horde of rebels who swarm out attacking one in twenty places at once - hit, roused, scraped, bared, swung through the air, so that life seems to flash by; then again blinded, knocked on the head - all of which are agreeable sensations for a reader (since nothing is more dismal than to open the door and get no response).

Whatever brief delights it provides, mere strangeness in poetry and prose eventually leaves us cold, especially when we suspect the writer is stretching for effect to avoid the actual life before his eyes.

A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.

Shakespeare again. Once you let him into your head, he takes up tenancy and will not leave.

Novels function and the power of novels function because of their stories.

What lasts in the reader's mind is not the phrase but the effect the phrase created: laughter, tears, pain, joy. If the phrase is not affecting the reader, what's it doing there? Make it do its job or cut it without mercy or remorse.

I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.

It is the life in literature that acts upon life.

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings.

Autobiographical writings, essays, interviews, various other things... All the non-fiction prose I wanted to keep, that was the idea behind this collected volume, which came out about few years ago. I didn't think of Winter Journal, for example, as an autobiography, or a memoir. What it is is a literary work, composed of autobiographical fragments, but trying to attain, I hope, the effect of music.

Books follow morals, and not morals books.

My greatest wish is that a certain way of looking at the world, a way I show in all of my books, gets into my readers' heads, and slowly alters their perception.

Ek gret effect men write in place lite; Th'entente is al, and nat the lettres space.

I wanted to be a visual artist, but I realized I was more affected by what I read than by what I saw. I would go to a show at a museum and look at a painting and say, 'Oh I wish I owned that,' and that would be the end of my relationship with a painting. With a short story I would read or with an author I would discover I could be haunted. It would affect my mood and affect the way that I saw the world. I thought, wow, it would be amazing to be able to do that.

I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure.