Literary Fascination Quotes

The Sonnets of Shakespeare have the fascination of an autobiography, without its clarity. It is like reading an important document in a cave by the light of matches which keep blowing out.

With the possible exception of steampunk aficionados, many reasonable people must view my fascination with Victorian and Edwardian popular fiction - mysteries, fantasy, and adventure - as eccentric or merely antiquarian.

I loved the book [The Adderall Diaries] I optioned it, I think some years ago. But there's a lot of different threads in the book. It starts off as one thing, where he's trying to cover this murder trial, and then his own life starts to impinge on that, so it becomes something else. I found that fascinating.

'Twilight' passed like a fever through the sophisticated reader and the unsophisticated reader alike. People devoured those books in single sittings, over weekends, with a kind of raw intensity that is rare.

I do not know any reading more easy, more fascinating, more delightful than a catalogue.

I like to take people you wouldn't really think people would write novels about: an aqueduct engineer, a code-breaker, a hedge-fund manager. It's in those sorts of lives that I find more fascination than in a CIA operative or a Marine or something like that.

How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!

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 discovered that I had, in the past two decades, written a far greater amount in the essay form than I remembered. Certainly I have written enough of it to demonstrate that I harbor no disdain for literary journalism or just plain journalism, under whose sponsorship I have been able to express much that has fascinated me, or alarmed me, or amused me, or otherwise engaged my attention when I was not writing a book.

He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.

There's still a fascination with somebody who can write at book length, no matter what the book is.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us.

Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough?

In the reading and writing life, delight, for me, is where the mystery lies. Easy enough to figure out how scenes of violence or tragedy or titillation or grossness or even sentimentality can move us, but how the written word elicits delight - what Nabokov calls that shiver in the spine - is much harder to calculate and define.

I leapt eagerly into books. The characters’ lives were so much more interesting than the lonely heartbeat of my own.

There was I, devouring books and yet allowing a man who had never read a book to walk me home for a bit of harmless fumbling on the front steps.

I'm not an academic; I'm just a bookish Joe who gets passionate about certain writers and suddenly wants to read everything they've ever written and find out why they wrote it.

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 just have a thing for writers. Maybe it because I'm just so not a writer.

Not only Freud but artists and writers were also interested in the unconscious. It was medicine that made the first steps toward modernity.

Translated literature can be fascinating. There's something so intriguing about reading the text second hand - a piece of prose that has already been through an extra filter, another consciousness, in the guise of the translator. Some of my favorite writers who have written in English were doing so without English being their first language, so there's a sense of distance or of distortion there, too. Conrad. Nabokov. These writers were employing English in interesting ways.

I think my fascination is less with genre figures than with writers in general.