4,370 Quotes About Literature

Literature is a toy for adults; my books are toys for adults who have read Lautréamont.

Literature is the queen of the arts —the greatest of them all, because it embraces them all. When you write, you are making music, painting, drawing, cinema...

إذا أرادت النساء يومًا أن يُغادرننا؛ فيتعيَّن عليهن أن يسلُبننا كل آداب وفنون العالم تقريبًا.

Jeg gir en god dag i litteraturen – foruten den franske da!

Writing itself is a bad enough trade, rightly held up to ridicule and contempt by the greater part of mankind, and especially by those who do real work, plowing, riding, sailing.

After thirty years working as a commercial fiction translator, I've reached to the conclussion that, on average, the more pages a book has, the less literature there is in it.

The seven bad-humored and unfunny devils who eat ourselves and our narratives alive are Pretentiousness, Pomposity, Presumption, Pontificality, Pavoninity or Peacockery, Pornography, and Pride, these seven offenses to all life. They have oozed out from under the iron doors and then they have inflated themselves immeasurably.

The art of story-telling has not been declining from the beginning. It has been declining for only about twelve thousand years. One reason for the decline is a dietary deficiency: the scarcity of Wooly Rhinoceros Meat and of Dire Wolf Meat. And the other reason is the disappearance of good places where good stories may be told.

Puns are at their core defined by multiplicity of meaning, not necessarily humor. The common expectation that puns should always be funny, or die in the attempt, is a relatively modern development.