4,370 Quotes About Literature

Like the bodies of dancers or athletes, the minds of readers are genuinely happy and self-possessed only when cavorting around, doing their stretches and leaps and jumps to the tune of words.

Literature is the power of fiction itself: not making a claim about what the world is, but about the imagination of a possible world.

Trying too hard to be too good, even when trying to be bad, is too good for the bad, too bad for the good.

I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love; love makes knots; love brutally tears them apart. I have been knotted; I have been torn apart.

I'll tell you something, though. I did not hate the lurid dreams. The best of them had an emotional reality, a core of honest sensation, that brought me nearer to aesthetic truth than did the stuff that the literati were always fussing about. Art, I believe, is where you find it.

Books can do many things, but not everything. We have to live the important things, not read them.

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Life happened because I turned the pages.