4,370 Quotes About Literature

We are only writing the history of our time.

That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.

Books are a staircase to unknown worlds.

Within a week I walked the streets of Tel-Aviv, I wandered around Budapest and found myself admiring the Architecture of Paris. That's the power of great literature.

Μα εμείς οι συγγραφείς, για κάτι ξεχασμένους κόσμους υπάρχουμε.

Literature is a cake with many toys baked inside-and even if you find them all, if you don't enjoy the path that leads you to them, it will be a hollow accomplishment. There was a playwright named Heller, American, I believe, who summed it up this way. He said, 'They knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.

What is the acceptable amount of blood for good literature?

But oh my dear, I am tired of being Alice in Wonderland. Does it sound ungrateful? It is. Only I do get tired.

There were the usual exhortations to purity – think of the novel not as your opportunity to get rich or famous but to wrestle, in your own way, with the titans of the form – exhortations poets don’t have to make, given the economic marginality of the art, an economic marginality that soon all literature will share.