Quotes About Literature And Reading

#1. Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.

Harold Bloom

#2. I grew up reading not-serious literature, like comic books and pulp novels, so my instinct is to amuse the reader and entertain.

Kevin Wilson

#3. What makes Geoffrey Chaucer such compelling reading is his creation of a riveting conversation between the ideal and the everyday.

John Mark Reynolds

#4. He did not wholly understand the intricate play of ideas and the complex phrases, but as he read he sensed a strong, who purpose behind the words and he felt that he almost understood.

Carson McCullers

#5. My memory of my household is of one immersed in books and music. I have a very intimate relationship with Bengali literature, particularly Tagore, and my interest besides reading then was music.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

#6. For someone who loves literature, and all books on principle, being asked to name three titles over a half century of serious reading is akin to asking one to recall their three favorite sunsets.

Thomas Steinbeck

#7. Literature has done great work for feminism - writing and reading are a practice of empathy - and great literature will continue to do so.

Julianna Baggott

#8. When I look back at what I've written and try to explain it, it doesn't help, but it helps to be in a process of writing. It's the same thing with reading - you lose yourself when you read as well. When I was younger I used literature that way, it was just escapism, a tool to run away from things.

Karl Ove Knausgard

#9. She would go off in the morning with the punt full of books, and spend long glorious days away in the forest lying on the green springy carpet of whortleberries, reading. She would most diligently work at furnishing her empty mind. She would sternly endeavour to train it not to jump.

Elizabeth Von Arnim

#10. A book can open the mind, free the heart, and speak to the soul.

Jason Ellis

#11. The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.

Iris Murdoch

#12. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books. (p. 5)

Rabih Alameddine

#13. A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound.

Richard Flanagan

#14. Literature has the ability to open up a whole new world to children, but we need to have a share in helping them to find that door and open it with them. Let's set the example and help to foster this love of reading in our little ones.

Carmela Dutra

#15. To each other, they talked at a gallop. Literature turned them on; their ideas flowed, ran back and forth like a current. (The Cousins)

Elizabeth Spencer

#16. Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them.

Stephen Greenblatt

#17. I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.

Virginia Woolf

#18. What are you reading? isn't a simple question when asked with genuine curiosity; it's really a way of asking, Who are you now and who are you becoming?

Will Schwalbe

#19. Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head.

Orhan Pamuk

#20. The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one.

James Goldsmith

#21. I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!

Philip Pullman

#22. I am the girl who spends hours huddled in a corner of a library, trying to find what you love the most about Marlowe, just so I can write you a poem worthy of Shakespeare. I've made books my lovers, hours my enemies and you the only story.

Nikita Gill

#23. I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

George Gissing

#24. Reading lets our mind visit new exciting worlds"

~Vianka Van Bokkem

Vianka Van Bokkem

#25. You have to read a book at the right time for you, and I am sure this cannot be insisted on too often, for it is the key to the enjoyment of literature.

Doris Lessing

#26. Childhood is the time and children's books are the place for powerful emotions, powerful language, powerful art ... There is no room for cutesy books, dull books, or books that talk down. Children are not inferior. They may be small in stature but not in what they feel, think, listen, and see.

Betsy Hearne

#27. Contemporary writers annoyed him, he found their worlds insular, their style too self-conscious and ironic. Theirs was not a literature that belonged to him.

Christos Tsiolkas

#28. I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.

Wislawa Szymborska

#29. Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

Oscar Wilde

#30. The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some sense of what makes literature worth reading.

Leslie Jamison

#31. I didn't hit her, man, what happened was that Maria was obsessed with the Marquis de Sade and wanted to try the spanking thing," said Luscious Skin.
"That's very Maria," said Pancho. "She takes her reading seriously.

Roberto Bolano

#32. The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only the best of what has been written.

Harold Bloom

#33. Literature is literature. Its purpose is to challenge and disorient us, to break us down a little bit so that we are forced to rebuild ourselves. Over time, over the course of many books, we construct a deeper, truer self.

Mark Slouka

#34. I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.

H.P. Lovecraft

#35. This was the curse of the voracious reader, she realized. Real life never quite measured up to the heightened and precise contours of her literary worlds. A real war was never as true as a fictive one.

Reif Larsen

#36. An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.

Roger Ebert

#37. I know that for every reader who has lost the habit or can't find the time, there are people who've never enjoyed reading and question the value of literature, either as entertainment or education, or believe that a love of books, and of fiction in particular, is sentimental or frivolous.

David Nicholls

#38. What you read when you don't have to ...

Oscar Wilde

#39. In books, that which is most generally interesting is what comes home to the most cherished private experience of the greatest number. It is not the book of him who has travelled the farthest over the surface of the globe, but of him who has lived the deepest and been the most at home.

Henry David Thoreau

#40. The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the title and the table of contents. Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian ... He's bound to lose perspective.

Robert Musil

#41. Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond of that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew.

Louis Aragon

#42. In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself ... I see with a myriad of eyes,but it is still I who see.

C.S. Lewis

#43. I'm kind of a nerd when it comes to literature and theory. I wish I could have more of that in life, but I don't because I'm always reading scripts or things to prepare for movies when I'm reading.

Elizabeth Olsen

#44. She liked getting hold of some book ... and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning without sharing her thoughts with any one, or having to decide whether the book was a good one or a bad one.

Virginia Woolf

#45. Without books, everything would have been crooked. Without books, the wisdom in books today would have been fairy and folk tales. Without books the whole truth about life would have been imaginations and a guessing game

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#46. Have you ever looked at, say, a picture or a great building or read a paragraph in a book and felt the world suddenly expand and, in the same instant, contract and harden into a kernel of perfect purity? Do you know what I mean? Everything suddenly fits, everything's in its place.

Carol Shields

#47. Reading is a time machine that allows you to acquire wisdom from the past and to analyze and imagine another person's vision of the future.

Joshua Rogers

#48. Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

C.S. Lewis

#49. The thing about literature is that, yes, there are kind of tides of fashion, you know; people come in and out of fashion; writers who are very celebrated fall into, you know, people you know stop reading them, and then it comes back again.

Salman Rushdie

#50. Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age of relentless humiliations - that we are more than ourselves; that we have souls.

Richard Flanagan

#51. Give her books, where other people did all the running around and courting; it was far easier to read about such matters than to experience them herself.

Sophie Dash

#52. Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.

Samuel Butler

#53. If you have feelings about reading, you feel the rhythm of prose or of a poem like music. It awakens something in your soul and then of course you study, read, you grow up and you begin to understand the message and that is the first step towards understanding life.

Maria Kodama

#54. Reading great works of literature, discovering poetry, and listening to the best composers are all ways that we learn to love the Creator more.

Jennifer A. Marshall

#55. C. S. Lewis said it this way: "In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. . . . I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do."12

Sarah Arthur

#56. There's no better way to inform and expand you mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature.

Stephen R. Covey

#57. I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.

Anita Brookner

#58. The reading of great books has been a life-altering activity to me and, for better or worse, brought me singing and language-obsessed to that country where I make my living. Except for teaching, I've had no other ambition in life than to write books that mattered.

Pat Conroy

#59. Oh? And what's so stinking about it?.

Anthony Burgess

#60. When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]

Jorge Luis Borges

#61. Books are in the mind, Grandfather Alessandro said. Too many books and you forget your body is in the world.

Tom Spanbauer

#62. She had a grocer's faith in books; they can be handed out like Green Stamps and were redeemable for a variety of useful gifts.

Pat Conroy

#63. Ours was a family in which everybody was constantly reading, and where literature, politics, history, and the events of the prize ring were discussed at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Louis L'Amour

#64. The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.

Max Lerner

#65. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.

J.D. Salinger

#66. Literature was life, and reading became an open door to a world beyond the familiar.

Terry Tempest Williams

#67. There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured.

Alberto Manguel

#68. The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.

Marguerite Yourcenar

#69. Mark Twain was an artist working at the highest level. He wrote a book, his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that put America on the world stage for literature. It's almost as if, if you start reading that book as a racist, you cannot finish it and still be a racist.

Val Kilmer

#70. The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own - the place where we live - and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves.

Cesare Pavese

#71. The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.

Rebecca West

#72. The best thing about being a writer is that 'work' is always something you love, plus usually accompanied by tea, coffee and cakes of some sort.

Jamie L. Harding

#73. Our existence has always and everywhere been tragic, but man has converted these numberless tragedies into works of art. I know of nothing more astonishing or more wonderful than this transformation.

Maxim Gorky

#74. If you ever meet someone who thinks they are so special, the best thing to do is smile. You don't have to say anything. Be friendly and then go do
your best. That will make you special, too!

Jeff Hutchins

#75. At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.

Lisel Mueller

#76. My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.

Gabrielle Zevin

#77. Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them.

Elizabeth Von Arnim

#78. I think that Oprah's on a mission to improve the lives of the average American in various ways. And one of them is to bring literature to people who would normally not be quite as demanding in their reading tastes, to show them writing that can be more than just entertainment.

Janet Fitch

#79. Minimalism is close to mediocrity and mindlessness, a way for the ungifted to have a literary career, and for readers who really hate literature to pretend to be reading something serious.

Paul West

#80. I think myself I ought to be shot for writing such nonsense ... But it's unquestionably good escapist literature and I think I should rather like it if I were sitting in an air-raid shelter or recovering from flu.

Georgette Heyer

#81. I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much.

Vladimir Putin

#82. The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called 'significant literature' will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles.

Raymond Chandler

#83. I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.

Helen Keller

#84. Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.

Susan Sontag

#85. Amie frowned. 'That's what I can't figure out. I mean everyone wants their happy ending, right? No one cares about reading actual literature anymore anyway. All they want is vampires and supernatural mumbo-jumbo. It's sick, really.

Jennifer Silverwood

#86. Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.

Bohumil Hrabal

#87. Well-wrought poems and works of imaginative literature can do for us what stone-cold prose can never do. They can help us grasp the full dimension of ways of life other than our own.

James W. Sire

#88. At Harvard I was taking an African-American studies class, and we were reading about the tragic mulatto. Invariably, the tragic mulatto can't fit in either world and flings herself off a bridge. So I'm reading, and I'm like, 'Oh, my God, I think I'm in literature,' but my life was never like that.

Soledad O'Brien

#89. Crammed among the stacks of books in his room, the author treated literature as if each book were a window in a city of unstable skyscrapers, and he was the window-washer tasked with the impossible job of cleaning them all. - From "Pageturner" in 365 Tomorrows

Joseph Patrick Pascale

#90. Kim Newman's Anno Dracula is back in print, and we must celebrate. It was the first mash-up of literature, history and vampires, and now, in a world in which vampires are everywhere, it's still the best, and its bite is just as sharp. Compulsory reading, commentary, and mindgame: glorious.

Neil Gaiman

#91. The policemen agreed they were living with a most peculiar fellow. One moment he was reading classical literature in the original French and quoting Tennyson, and the next he would be discussing the best way to blow up a train.

Ben Macintyre

#92. Canada has always been a great place for literature. It's strong and growing stronger, and there will always be reading, and there will always be great writers.

Ruth Ozeki

#93. When I was a kid, I went through the whole process of reading great literature and trying to be very widely read.

Terry Hayes

#94. People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves.

Harold Bloom

#95. Literature gives great light and great life.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#96. The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.

Ross Macdonald

#97. I don't know when reading books became the most essential thing about me, but it happened over the years and I found myself the most willing servant of what I considered a rich habit.

Pat Conroy

#98. Give yourself to reading.' ... You need to read. Renounce as much as you will all light literature, but study as much as possible sound theological works,
especially the Puritanic writers, and expositions of the Bible.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#99. We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.

Vladimir Nabokov

#100. Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report.

Ursula K. Le Guin