Literature Quotes

"Do not read as children do to amuse yourself or like the ambitious for the purpose of instruction No read in order to live" "The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy" "Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing." "Call me Ishmael." "The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death" "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." "Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise." "You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you" "The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries" "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." "April is the cruellest month"