Literary Genius Quotes

Reading is the royal road to intellectual eminence...Truly good books are more than mines to those who can understand them. They are the breathings of the great souls of past times. Genius is not embalmed in them, but lives in them perpetually.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

Shakespeare was a dramatist of note who lived by writing things to quote.

I think Shakespeare is really the one. Words as music and music as words. Everything he wrote was good, which is really frightening.

Shakespeare - I was very influenced - still am - by Shakespeare. I couldn't believe that a white man in the 16th century could so know my heart.

I am rather partial to Shakespeare, though I haven't done loads. But when it's done right, there's nothing like it. There are layers upon layers upon layers, and you unpack new things constantly. I don't know how he knew so many things - about the world, about women, about human nature, life, death, our fears and hopes.

Walt Whitman, he who laid end to end words never seen in each other's company before outside of a dictionary.

Shakespeare's work is like a good song: you never really forget the main lines.

Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Proust - not exactly authors one expects to whiz through or take lightly, but like all works of genius, they are meant to be read out loud and loved.

I hear Shakespeare, sometimes, the way other people might hear God or Marx or something. But he's so different from that.

William Shakespeare tried hard to see every facet of every question, probably because he was more interested in questions than in answers. That's a big part of what makes him great, in my opinion.

Octavia Butler, of course, is brilliant and disturbing.

I love William Shakespeare. He wrote some of the rawest stories. I mean look at Romeo and Juliet. That's some serious ghetto expletive. You got this guy Romeo from the Bloods who falls for Juliet, a female from the Crips, and everybody in both gangs are against them. So they have to sneak out and they end up dead for nothing. Real tragic stuff.

Most poets are mad. It doesn't qualify us for anything.

Yeah, I loved Ray Bradbury.

The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.

Stephen [King], who wrote the script himself, was on the set [of The Stand], and I was just so fortunate to get to know him. What a wonderful man. He may go down in history as the greatest American writer, pound for pound.

Shakespeare is undoubtedly the greatest dramatist the world has known, and 95 countries translate his work into their languages.

I have never loved any writer as much as Hemingway.

Shakespeare would never have gone far in today's politically correct world.

William Shakespeare sounds to me like some kind of faggot.

I think Lena Dunham is a very bright and very interesting writer, and what she's accomplished at such a young age absolutely impresses me.

George Saunders's 'Lincoln in the Bardo' is a hands-down masterpiece - the subject of Abraham Lincoln and the genius of this author is a perfect union.

What Shakespeare was able to do in English he would certainly not have done in French.

But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.