Quotes and Sayings about Literature

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Poetry, she thought, wasn't written to be analyzed, it was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding.

A living poem had always been the words that came to mind when he tried to describe her to others.

Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don't want to make eye contact while doing it.

Trying to write about love is ultimately like trying to have a dictionary represent life. No matter how many words there are, there will never be enough.

Word to the wise writer: never underestimate your secondary characters! But watch them... they sneak off with stuff.

Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people.

A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.

So long as men write what they think, then all of the other freedoms - all of them - may remain intact. And it is then that writing becomes a weapon of truth.

I do have a tendency to walk on the dark side sometimes. I have suffered from depression, I know how that feels, I have an innate inclination that way. Writing does help with that.

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast - talk them or write them down.

I want to tell a story that makes the reader always want to see what will happen next.

Always speak the truth, think before you speak, and write it down afterwards.

I listen to my words, but they fall far below
I let my music take me, where my heart wants to go

You cannot write for children. They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

When asked, 'How do you write?' I invariably answer, 'one word at a time.'

The written word endures, the spoken word disappears.

A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone.

"One must always be careful of books," said Tessa, "and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us."

If you have never spent whole afternoons with burning ears and rumpled hair, forgetting the world around you over a book, forgetting cold and hunger-

If you have never read secretly under the bedclothes with a flashlight, because your father or mother or some other well-meaning person has switched off the lamp on the plausible ground that it was time to sleep because you had to get up so early-

If you have never wept bitter tears because a wonderful story has come to an end and you must take your leave of the characters with whom you have shared so many adventures, whom you have loved and admired, for whom you have hoped and feared, and without whose company life seems empty and meaningless-

If such things have not been part of your own experience, you probably won't understand what Bastian did next.

I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book.

If you don't like to read you haven't found the right book.

Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.

Few things leave a deeper mark on the reader, than the first book that finds its way to his heart.

Never memorize what you can look up in books.

Jeod: "Books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life."

I'm sorry, but how can one possibly pay attention to a book with no pictures in it?

Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.

One should never underestimate the power of books.

Books are a uniquely portable magic.

If you stop to think about it, you’ll have to admit that all the stories in the world consist essentially of twenty-six letters. The letters are always the same, only the arrangement varies. From letters words are formed, from words sentences, from sentences chapters, and from chapters stories.

Of all the worlds that man has created, the one in books is the most impressive.

Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.

'And what is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversation?'

Live in the present, make the most of it, it's all you've got.

You can't help what you feel, but you can help how you behave.

Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.

Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.

Disappearances are bread-and-butter to journalists.

A good journalist never reveals her sources.

There is always something left to love.

It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.

People live their lives bound by what they accept as correct and true. That's how they define reality. But what does it mean to be correct or true? Merely vague concepts. Their reality may all be a mirage. Can we consider them to simply be living in their own world, shaped by their beliefs?

I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.

Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you.