Literature Quotes

"The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night." "If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!" "It is my aim, and every poet's, to have each work as a whole and each separate paragraph too, to be the whole story, with beginning, middle, climax, and end." "You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith." "What is there that is too dirty, too sordid, too depressing to be read about or spoken of? If literature cannot deal with the grimy underbelly of life, then what is it for?" "If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten either write things worth reading or do things worth writing" "Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture." "The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means." "We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness." "To produce a mighty book you must choose a mighty theme " "God keep me from ever completing anything This whole book is but a draught nay but the draught of a draught " "Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks." "Goethe said things that comfort the soul and the mind can bear" "She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain." "I like good strong words that mean something." "We read to know we are not alone." "There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it." "Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby." "It takes a long time to write anything that’s worth reading" "I will write for a few more years to see if I can beat this. Literature gives the reader a second chance at life. Life is writing. The most difficult thing for a political leader is getting intelligent people to do stupid things. When you believe in a cause, nothing is impossible."