4,370 Quotes About Literature

Comic books are modern myths.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. It does much more than that, it tells us the truth about its readers; and, oddly enough, it tells us this all the more the more cynical and immoral be the motive of its manufacture.

And that is to say, of course, that you can "read" a culture without its literature, without the bother of gathering and holding its ideas, considering their genesis and evolution, and weighing them in the balance with each other.

In the course of time, Michael Strogoff reached a high station in the Empire. But it is not the history of his success, but the history of his trials, which deserves to be related.

To treat fiction as if it were a religious or moral sermon is about as far from the actuality of literature as it is possible to get and indeed it is, in my opinion, the purest form of intellectual barbarism.

Kisslikeyouneverhada past.

We must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled.

That was when Estefania, who had made her pain the world’s pain, stood up, her knees dirty, shaking, her tights torn. She took a distanced look around and then she started tearing her tights even more. She kicked her expensive shoes through the wind, then she ripped off her dress, screaming as if it were burning, her second skin, her role as an actress, her one-woman show, as if she herself were on fire, as if her clothes were drenched in acid and abandoned love.

Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows.