4,370 Quotes About Literature

I felt a wish never to leave that room - a wish that dawn might never come, that my present frame of mind might never change.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.

I hated labels anyway. People didn’t fit in slots—prostitute, housewife, saint—like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.

What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

The vast majority of us imagine ourselves as like literature people or math people. But the truth is that the massive processor known as the human brain is neither a literature organ or a math organ. It is both and more.

We write from life and call it literature, and literature lives because we are in it.

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.