Quotes about literature

As a fantasy writer, Skraelin was not highly regarded…

“…one cannot call him profoundly mediocre without venturing so far out on the critical limb as to bend it to the ground…”

“…so derivative that the reader loses track of who he’s ripping off…”

“…to say he is tin-eared would render a disservice to a blameless citizen of the periodic table of the elements…”

But he was so freakishly prolific…and prolific was what Richard needed at this point in the game.

But please remember this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.

Air Chrysalis had long since disappeared from the bestseller lists. Number one on the list now was a diet book entitled Eat as Much as You Want of the Food You Love and Still Lose Weight. What a great title. The whole book could be blank inside and it would still sell.

In short, Fahrenheit 451 was never meant to be an instruction manual.

Modern fantasy is little more than juvenile escapism and anachronistic longing for a time that never existed. I’ve never understood the appeal.

If books are indeed magic (and does anyone really believe otherwise?), then they are a collaborative magic between author and reader.

Literature is prophetic-life often lives up to fiction ("Preface: Memoir of Diamond Dust")

“You know, I've been thinking: all the women in the books you like -- Sartre and Camus and all that -- they don't really exist. Not as people. They're only there to wait for the men. To love them and be loved back or not -- mostly not; to be beaten up or killed; to appear as a face on the wall of Meurseault's cell--”

“Mr. Wonderful isn’t just going to knock on the door,” a girlfriend once said, chiding me. “Why not?” I thought. That’s the way people often meet in books—effortlessly, without guile or strategizing.

Such is the power of words, of writing, of books. Words you loved and will always yearn for. They can inspire you with possibilities you otherwise would have never imagined; they can fill your head with misleading fantasies. They can give you back your seemingly seamless past and place it right alongside your chaotic present.

“But that only happens in books,” my mother, pretty much immune to the power of the written word, would say.

Exactly. That’s why I can’t stop reading them.

Angels in the house always die in the books they preside over because early ascension into heaven is their reward—and because their goodness makes them boring.

We read literature for a lot of reasons, but two of the most compelling ones are to get out of ourselves and our own life stories and—equally important—to find ourselves by understanding our own life stories more clearly in the context of others’.