4,370 Quotes About Literature

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

Writing is a bittersweet addiction. The more it drains you; the more replenished you feel, and you crave it even more.

Literature is a virus.

If you want to take pictures of Chinese food, you have to taste real Chinese food. The flavors soak into your tongue, go into your stomach. The stomach is where your true feelings are. And if you take photos, these true feelings from your stomach can come out, so that everyone can taste the food just by looking at your pictures.

The world is a navy in an empty ocean.

The world contained in a seed, Determined by its program.

Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.

[M]ay not literature (and, in particular, fiction) be considered a desperate and permanently thwarted effort to produce a unique form of expression? Something like a cry, perhaps, a cry that, somehow, inexplicably contains all the millions of words that have ever existed, anywhere, in any age. In contrast with the spoken word and its classifying function, the purpose of writing seems, rather, to be a quest for the egg, the seed, nothing more.

Evidently, I'd suffered an epiphany: the subconscious realization that when it comes to coolness, nothing the human race has ever invented is more cool than a book.