Quotes about Literature

Putnam increased the first print run to 75,000 copies, more than any science fiction hardcover printing in history.

It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.

I'm given a lot of credit with opening the doors for Christian fiction. It was kind of a difficult field when I got into it... But I don't feel like a king.

A book, too, can be a star, explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.

As a child, when I came across a word I didn't know, I didn't stop reading the story to look it up, I just went on reading. And after I had come across the word in several books, I knew what it meant; it had been added to my vocabulary. This still happens.

The more limited our language is, the more limited we are; the more limited the literature we give to our children, the more limited their capacity to respond, and therefore, in their turn, to create. The more our vocabulary is controlled, the less we will be able to think for ourselves. We do think in words, and the fewer words we know, the more restricted our thoughts. As our vocabulary expands, so does our power to think.

If I cannot see evidence of incarnation in a painting of a bridge in the rain by Hokusai, a book by Chaim Potok or Isaac Bashevis Singer, music by Bloch or Bernstein, then I will miss its significance in an Annunciation by Franciabigio, the final chorus of the St. Matthew Passion , the words of a sermon by John Donne.

In worldly terms, she was totally innocent; Eve before the fall, with no knowledge of good and evil. She made one realize how necessary the Fall was; without it, there would have been no human drama, and so no literature, no art, no suffering, no religion, no laughter, no joy, no sin and no redemption. Only camera work (towards which Mrs. Dobbs's painting was reaching) and sociology (which her sister, Beatrice Webb, may be said to have invented).

Agnon himself was an observant Jew who kept the Sabbath and wore a skullcap; he was, literally, a God-fearing man: in Hebrew, fear and faith are synonyms. There are corners in Agnon's stories where, in an indirect, cleverly camouflaged way, the fear of God is portrayed as a terrible dread of God: Agnon believes in God and fears him, but he does not love him.

What surrounded me did not count. All that counted was made of words.

At the very least literature should not preen itself on mocking us and picking at our wounds, as modern writers in our days do ad nauseam. All they can write is satire, irony, parody (including self-parody), vicious sarcasm, all steeped in malice.

You can never be wise unless you love reading.