Literary Loss Quotes

I regret all of my books.

In a recent fire Bob Dole's library burned down. Both books were lost. And he hadn't even finished coloring one of them.

It's been suggested that most women fail to write significantly because the female mind is viscerotonic, and occupied almost exclusively with the moment-to-moment reality of emotions. If this is true, literature's loss is science fiction's gain, for Out of Bounds, Judith Merril's collection of short stories, is a warm and colorful rendering of the minutiae of the future.

Sometimes I regret that the wonderful children's stories that have been made into movies were - people no longer read 'The Wizard of Oz'; they think they know the story. They don't know anything about all the bits and pieces they had to leave out.

Would it be anything like a literary disaster if Gore Vidal were to fall silent? Easy. No. In fact, there is something to be said for the idea.

However, if I shall live to be eighty I shall probably be the only person left in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications.

One way an author dies a little each day is when his books go out of print.

One is always enthralled, I think, when a young writer you're just beginning to read and comprehend dies.

The sole literary presence from my childhood was my grandfather, a Jewish immigrant from Latvia, who eccentrically copied poems into the backs of his books. After he died, when I was 8 years old, my grandmother gave his books away, and his poems were lost.

I love John Updike immoderately. I am profoundly shocked that he has gone because he was, for me, the greatest American writer of the second half of the 20th century. He was also a gracious, charming, and witty man.

Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Lovers of literature will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism.

A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug.

One can imagine a world without essays. It would be a little poorer, of course, like a world without chess, but one could live in it.

The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Meeting authors is kind of the death of the characters. That is always heartbreaking.

There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something unique and never surpassed will cease to exist except in the libraries of a few inquisitive book lovers.

If all the historic books of the Bible were blotted from the memory of mankind, nothing of value would be lost.