Maybe at the very bottom of it… I really don’t like God. You know, it’s silly to say I don’t like God because I don’t believe in God, but in the same sense that I don’t like Iago, or the Reverend Slope or any of the other villains of literature, the god of traditional Judaism...

Literature always anticipates life. It doesn’t copy it but moulds it to it’s purpose.

There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I’ll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it’ll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.

All hen are created equal but some have more feather than others.

Literature is integrated, and I’m not just talking about color or race. I’m talking about the power of literature to make us recognize – and again and again – the wholeness of the human experience.

My beloved isn’t dazzling light, Darkness is my beloved – The reason I’m so fond of her…

You may be ableto fly to heaven with my love.But for real, my love is onlya cheap wine.Seriously,Only God’s love is the precious wine.And She evengives it to everyone.For free!

People who want to change everything in the world but never think of changing themselves are clapping with one palm.

Prayer is an insurance policy that you can never lapse on.

We all R failures that’s why V need #CHILDREN to fulfill D needs of #Society,#Nation,#Worlds , so that we can live the same old selfish way

To maintain your honesty , one must know to keep alive the spirit of chidhood

An unhappy ending makes it literature rather than romantic fiction.

The parrot had a range of phrases. His own name (‘Niko, Niko’), the name of his original owner and now ‘Stavros’. Occasionally he would also say ‘Panagia mou’, which could be an expression of piety but also a gentle expletive, depending on how it was said. With the parrot it was hard to tell. It...

A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are...

An unfinished book. left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will and ruthless determination to tame it again.

The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know — the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be…. The thought that other books were...

…the pleasures of literary fiction are the pleasures of orientation; the pleasures of literature are the pleasures of bewilderment.

(the modern writer’s aim is) general revelation by suggestion (and) making a very tiny part do for a whole.

When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[…].

Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.

Apollinaire said a poet should be ‘of his time.’ I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don’t want credit cards; I want cash in ducats and gold doubloons.

I’m not ashamed of heroic ambitions. If man and woman can only dance upon this earth for a few countable turns of the sun… let each of us be an Artemis, Odysseus, or Zeus… Aphrodite to the extent of the will of each one.

One of the disadvantages of almost universal education was the fact that all kinds of persons acquired a familiarity with one’s favourite writers. It gave one a curious feeling; it was like seeing a drunken stranger wrapped in one’s dressing gown.

Reality is not an inspiration for literature. At its best, literature is an inspiration for reality.

A book is the cheapest ticket you will ever hold.

Allein die Literatur erlaubt uns, mit dem Geist eines Toten in Verbindung zu treten, auf direkte, umfassendere und tiefere Weise, als das selbst in einem Gespräch mit einem Freund möglich wäre – denn so tief und dauerhaft eine Freundschaft sein mag, niemals liefert man sich in einem Gespräch so restlos aus, wie man sich einem...

My words, my writing, my actions—these have never been for myself alone, either directly or indirectly. There is no such thing as an artist who creates art only for himself. That is masturbation.

Spend the glittering moonlight therePursuing down the soundless deepLimbs that gleam and shadowy hair,Or floating lazy, half-asleep.Dive and double and follow after,Snare in flowers, and kiss, and call,With lips that fade, and human laughterAnd faces individual,Well this side of Paradise! . . .There’s little comfort in the wise.

I am no longer a writer. Just an emotion. An emotion that is unable to stay within its own body, and is therefore, trying to make its way into yours.

Books are in the mind, Grandfather Alessandro said. Too many books and you forget your body is in the world.

When it comes to literature, we are all groping in the dark, even the writer. Especially the writer. And that is a good thing–maybe one of the best things about literature. It’s always an adventure of some kind.

Martial (the main character of LOCUS SOLUS) has a very interesting conception of literary beauty: the work must contain nothing real, no observations about the world or the mind, nothing but completely imaginary constructions. These are in themselves ideas from an extrahuman world.

… one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line,...

I sometimes used to ask myself, what on earth did I love her for? Maybe fore the warm hazel iris of her fluffy eyes, or for the natural side-wave of her brown hair, done anyhow, or again for that movement of her plump shoulders. But, probably the truth was that I loved her because she...

The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author’s supervision swell gradually with the reader’s lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that – not very appetizing – food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries.

Writers are engineers of human souls.

I thought a lighthouse is out at sea.

Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while.

The books we love offer a sketch of a whole universe that we secretly inhabit, and in which we desire the other person to assume a role.One of the conditions of happy romantic compatibility is, if not to have read the same books, to have read at least some books in common with the other...

I tell the story to you now, but in each telling the story itself changes a little, changes direction, and that in turn changes you and me. So be very careful not only in how you repeat it but in how you remember it, goslings. More often than you realize it, the world is shaped...

I never thought I’d fall madly in love with literature.

Life itself has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become displaced, fantastic, familiar-unfamiliar. This is why it is so logical for literature today to be drawn to the fantastic plot,...

If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.

In my early teens, I heard about Naked Lunch and its mutating typewriters and talking cockroaches. While I would hardly classify its dystopic vision as erotica now, at the time, Naked Lunch was my first foray into consuming smut. It was because of Burroughs that I knew about the particular musk that blooms when a...

The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an...

Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair.

For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.

What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And — though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall– what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models...

Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self…. What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself — a troupe of players that I...