Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered. W. H. Auden
The unusual is only found in a very small percentage, except in literary creations, and that is exactly what makes literature. Julio Cortazar
The adult relation to books is one of absorbing rather than being absorbed. Anthony Burgess,
Most of today’s books have an air of having been written in one day from books read the night before. Chamfort
The existence of good bad literature; the fact that no one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one’s intellect simply refuses to take seriously is a reminder that art is not the same thing as celebration. George Orwell
When one can read, can penetrate the enchanted realm of books, why write? Colette
Most people won’t realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship it like anything else. Katherine Anne Porter
Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself. Truman Capote
A writer lives, at best, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lays a deeper one of wonder at it all. To transmit that feeling, he writes. William Sansom
The bare objects of a book, or of a story, might also have a subtle relation to our own past. ... It is where lies part of the pleasure and urgency. It is one of the ways an author speaks to a reader, and becomes integrated into the reader’s own imaginative life. Even the most sophisticated readers read novels in the light of their own experience, and in such recognition, sympathy may begin. Source: My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead
A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers. Ernest Dimnet
Literature was formerly an art and finance a trade; today it is the reverse. Joseph Roux
The most thrilling version of the Bible was printed in 1631 by Robert Barker and Martin Lucas, the King’s printers at London. It contained several mistakes, but one was inspired, for the word “not” was omitted from the Seventh Commandment and enjoined its readers, on the highest authority, to commit adultery.
A classic is something that everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read. Mark Twain
The illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is Amorphous, literature is formal. Francoise Sagan
The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. T. S. Eliot
Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very”; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. Mark Twain
I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that nature with which I am acquainted. Mythology comes nearest to it of any. Henry David Thoreau
A book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it. T. S. Eliot
Perversity is the muse of modern literature. Susan Sontag
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry without a certain unsoundness of mind. Thomas Macaulay
An inveterate and incurable itch for writing besets many and grows old with their sick hearts. Juvenal
It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous. Robert Benchley
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents. Ezra Pound
Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of the various, the possibility, complexity, and difficulty. Lionel Trilling
There is much trickery required to grow rich by a stupid book as there is folly in buying it. LA Bruyere
A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right. John K. Hutchens
Reading makes a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. Francis Bacon
A great classic means a man whom one can praise without having read. G. K. Chesterton
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. Somerset Maugham
In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn’t be mixed. And if they are, the fiction parts should be printed in red ink, the fact parts in black ink. Catherine Drinker Bowen
In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from binding. Charles Lamb
The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman. Boris Pasternak
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. Virginia Woolf
In a very real sense, the writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratifications, is a curious anticlimax. Alfred Kazin
Books give not wisdom where none before was, but where some is, their reading makes it more. Sir John Harrington
I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering. Robert Frost
He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public. Emerson
I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction. A. Bevan
Have you any right to read, especially novels, until you have exhausted the best part of the day in some employment that is called practical? Charles Dudley Warner
Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the reader recognizes as his own. Salvatore Quasimodo
He that I am reading seems always to have the most force. Montaigne
The modernness of all good books seems to give me an existence as wide as man. Emerson
Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they are written. Thoreau
Isn’t it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists? Kelvin Throop
My experience with public libraries is that the first volume of the book I inquire for is out, unless I happen to want the second, when that is out. Oliver Wendell Holmes
The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes. Andre Gide
Hard-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hard-covered book to a friend and when he doesn’t return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five-cent books are different. John Steinbeck
When we read too fast or too slowly we understand nothing. Pascal
Poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere, and at all times, in hundreds and hundreds of men. Goethe
Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. Georges Simenon
The poet begins where the man ends. The man’s lot is to live his human life; the poet’s to invent what is nonexistent. Jose Ortega Y Gasset
How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words. Maurice Maeterlinck
A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself. Marianne Moore
The business man who is a novelist is able to drop in on literature and feel no suicidal loss of esteem if the lady is not at home, and he can spend his life preparing without fuss for the awful interview. V. S. Pritchett
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who are minded beyond reason the opinion of others. Virginia Woolf
Words not only affect us temporarily; they change us, they socialize or unsocialize us. David Riesman
Biography broadens the vision and allows us to live a thousand lives in one. Elbert Hubbard
The world, in its sheer exuberance of kindness, will try to bury the poet with warm and lovely human trivialities. It will even ask him to autograph books. Christopher Morley
Few books have more than one thought; the generality indeed have not quite so many. Julius and Augustus Hare
Authors are sometimes like tomcats; they distrust all other toms, but they are kind to kittens. Malcolm Cowley
The poet camouflages, in the expression of joy, his despair at not having found its reality. Max Jacob
He that does not expect a million readers should not write a line. Goethe
The first thing to have in a library is a shelf. From time to time this can be decorated with literature, but the shelf is the main thing. Finley Peter Dunne
Those things, for which we find words, are things that we have already overcome. Nietzsche
There are favorable hours for reading a book, as for writing it. Longfellow
As to the pure mind all things are pure, so to the poetic mind all things are poetical. Longfellow
If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write. Epictetus
Journalism is literature in a hurry. Matthew Arnold
We poets in our youth begin in gladness; but thereof come in the end despondency and madness. William Wordsworth
