Literary Knowledge Quotes

Wise books For half the truths they hold are honored tombs.

I have an excellent memory - for books and authors, that is. I remember all the books I've read.

For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.

I've been on 'Mastermind' - I tied for first place and then lost on the number of passes. My subject was the 'His Dark Materials' trilogy by Philip Pullman. If I did it again, I'd choose Shakespearian tragedies.

The real Stephen Colbert is a practicing Catholic. He teaches Sunday school. He can recite chapter and verse of chapter and verse - from both the King James Bible and 'The Lord of the Rings.'

It is no more expected of most producers to read a book than it is, say, of Ted Williams to dust off home plate.

The blue-collar is not supposed to read Horace, nor the farmer in his overalls Montale or Marvell. Nor, for that matter, is the politician expected to know by heart Gerard Manley Hopkins or Elizabeth Bishop. This is dumb as well as dangerous.

Know your genre. Know your history. Read a book.

Whilst that the childe is young, let him be instructed in vertue and lytterature.

Any one who chooses will set up for a literary critic, though he cannot tell us where he went to school, or how much time was spent in his education, and knows nothing about letters at all.

The more you read, the better you are at writing, no matter what you're writing. A lot of songwriters miss that and don't see the connection there, and I've always felt like you're more able to communicate if you have a bigger toolbox to work with.

Shakespeare I love, but for an English graduate, I'm incredibly badly read.

The main aim of education should be to send children out into the world with a reasonably sized anthology in their heads so that, while seated on the lavatory, waiting in doctors' surgeries, on stationary trains or watching interviews with politicians, they may have something interesting to think about.

Students don't know who Mark Twain was because he wasn't on the test.

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

People who have read a good deal rarely make great discoveries. I do not say this in excuse of laziness, but because invention presupposes an extensive independent contemplation of things.

You've read half the books in this house? This whole house?" "Well, approximately half." Sticky said. "To be more accurate, I suppose I've read more like" - his eyes went up as he calculated - "three sevenths? Yes, three sevenths." "Only three sevenths?" said Kate, pretending to look disappointed. "And here I was prepared to be impressed.

I probably have a 20,000-word vocabulary. I'll match my wits with anyone on literature, science and the arts.

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.

A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.

The sure foundations of the state are laid in knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at culture, at book learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind, is the demagogue's sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national degeneracy and ruin.

I've probably read more bad science fiction than anyone else alive. But I've also read more good science fiction than anyone else alive.

An artist should be well read in the best books, and thoroughly high bred, both in heart and bearing. In a word, he should be fit for the best society, and should keef out of it.

You can be too rich and too thin, but you can never be too well read or too curious about the world.

By the age of nine, I had a thorough knowledge of contemporary Polish literature as well as of foreign literature in Polish translation, and I began to write poems in honour of a lady of thirty years. Naturally, she knew nothing about them.