Literature Quotes

The profuseness of the Arabian learning, the multiplicity of the departments into which it entered, its zeal, the enormous proportions of the resulting literature, the vast libraries, the schools, the lecture rooms with their thousands of students, the universities, the institutions devoted to special sciences, the observatories and laboratories so royally equipped, the schools of logic and grammar, the whole attractive republic of letters, in which princes mingled with the sons of tradesmen or mechanics, while court favorites vied with impoverished authors for the honors of literature, all the ardor of a great intellectual movement passing before our eyes under Oriental guise, dispose the mind to enthusiastic judgments.

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

I have a longing for fiction, to try to believe in it and to disappear into it.

My Alma mater was books, a good library... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.

As a kid, I dreamt of becoming a writer. My most exciting pastime was reading novels; in fact, I would read anything I could find.

In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? Or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? What new substances have their chemists discovered? Or what old ones have they advanced? What new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of Americans? Who drinks out of American glasses? Or eats from American plates? Or wears American coats or gowns? or sleeps in American blankets? Finally, under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave, whom his fellow-creatures may buy and sell and torture?

In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes or art that is detached from or independent of politics.

Science fiction literature's focus is on ideas, the concept of change, and the impact on humanity. Those concepts are hard to capture on film. They work better in the mind.

Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.

I enjoy reading books.

Just so you know, when they say "once upon a time"....they're lying. It's not once upon a time. Its not even twice upon a time. It's hundreds of times, over and over, every time someone opens up the pages of this dusty old book.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.

A poem begins with a lump in the throat

It isn't pleasant to surrender to the hegemony of a nation which is still wild and primitive, and to concede the absolute superiority of its customs and institutions, science and technology, literature and art. Must one sacrifice so much in the name of the unity of mankind?

One of the great privileges of my life was growing up in a house without books.

I tend to really be partial to Ayn Rand, and to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

When one has no particular talent for anything, one takes to the pen.

… the tendency, reprehensible and paradoxical as it might be, has been for the national clusters of immigrants, as they became more and more firmly established and more and more prosperous, to cultivate more and more assiduously the literatures and cultural traditions of their homelands. Assimilation, in other words, instead of washing out the memories of Europe, made them more and more intensely real. Just as these clusters became more and more objectively American, did they become more and more German or Scandinavian or Bohemian or Polish.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

the cultivation and encouragement of the mechanic and of the elegant arts, the advancement of literature, and the progress of the sciences, ornamental and profound.

I think the written word is my first love. I was just a very imagination - centered child and a big part of that imaginary life came from reading.

While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.

Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.

I read prodigiously as a child, and I still do.