Quotes about Literature

I am speaking of University Education, which implies an extended range of reading, which has to deal with standard works of genius, or what are called the classics of a language: and I say, from the nature of the case, if Literature is to be made a study of human nature, you cannot have a Christian Literature. It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless Literature of a sinful man.

And reading itself is an amazing activity: You glance at a thin, flat object made from a tree...and the voice of the author begins to speak inside your head. (Hello!)

For the price of a modest meal you can ponder the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the origin of species, the interpretation of dreams, the nature of things. Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.

Inquest juries frequently linked suicide to cheap literature. When a twelve-year-old servant boy hanged himself in Brighton in 1892, the jury delivered a verdict of 'suicide during temporary insanity, induced by reading trashy novels'. When a twenty-one-year-old farm labourer in Warwickshire shot himself in the head in 1894, the coroner suggested that the fifty penny dreadfuls found in his room had had 'an unhinging and mesmeric effect' upon his mind.

In every other age and class man is held responsible for his reading, and not reading responsible for man. The books a man or woman reads are less the making of character than the expression of it.

You could compile, I should think, the worst book in the world entirely out of selecting passages from the best writers in the world.

Who's got some paregoric? said Stubb, he has the stomach-ache, I'm afraid. Lord, think of having half an acre of stomach-ache! Adverse winds are holding mad Christmas in him, boys. It's the first foul wind I ever knew to blow from astern; but look, did ever whale yaw so before? it must be, he's lost his tiller.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

It's tricky to take a book of short stories and turn it into a feature film.

A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is.

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.