4,370 Quotes About Literature

I don’t write literature but simply confessions, just as a drowning man or a man dying of poisoning no longer worries about the state of his hair or the modulation of his voice, but instead simply lets out a scream.

The either/or proposition that forces you to choose between your community and, say, your country has never been true. The very skills we learn to cross borders within ourselves help us to cross borders toward others outside our community.

The Russian reader in old cultured Russia was certainly proud of Pushkin and of Gogol, but he was just as proud of Shakespeare or Dante, of Baudelaire or of Edgar Allan Poe, of Flaubert or of Homer, and this was the Russian reader's strength. I have a certain personal interest in the question, for if my fathers had not been good readers, I would hardly be here today, speaking of these matters in this tongue.

I am aware of many things being quite as important as good writing and good reading; but in all things it is wiser to go directly to the quiddity, to the text, to the source, to the essence—and only then evolve whatever theories may tempt the philosopher, or the historian, or merely please the spirit of the day.

Literature is not a pattern of ideas but a pattern of images. Ideas do not matter much in comparison to a book's imagery and magic. The word, the expression, the image is the true function of literature. Not ideas.

A poorly written sentence was a poorly formed idea.

Turgenev complained in a letter that Spring in Europe lacked the explosiveness of that season in Russia.

Tolstoy was obsessed with truth, but only told it in his novels. Dostoyevsky, obsessed not with truth but with God, was a compulsive gambler. He pawned his watch so many times that his saintly second wife said she never knew what time it was.

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