Literature Quotes

"The only advice that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions." "For more, you can refer to his books or speeches directly." "Reading is my favourite occupation, when I have leisure for it and books to read" "Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise." "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library" "I am not sure that I exist actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited" "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" "Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable." "Literature is fire" "I don't write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me" "I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face" "Manuscripts don't burn." "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 you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it." "This is the way the world ends not with a bang but a whimper" "I'm a huge historical fiction and non-fiction fan" "The past is never dead. It's not even past." "The name of the rose is a mere symptom of our nostalgia for a time when names meant something." "If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it" "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."