Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.And so we readers walk, and dream,...

For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.

Özgürlük senin nene gerek? Çünkü dışarda elin kolun serbest gezerken sende kalan son inancını da yitirebilirsin.

İnsanları birbirlerinden, aralarına giren ölümden başka ne ayırır?

The conventional use of words and of narrative structure is deliberately subverted in decadent fiction; language deviates from the established norms in an attempt to reproduce pathology on a textual level. With its emphasis on...

Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.

Literature sustains life because it captures death in its forward march. Clickety-clickety-clack, the wheels go round and round …

For a game, you don’t need a teacher.

To write good poems is the secret of brevity.

What we call life is only talk of nature.

And this that you call solitude is in fact a big crowd.

The world contained in a seed, Determined by its program.

It is vain futility to analyze the algebra of time.

To dream on occasion is not dreaming, To love on occasion is not love.

We need knew knights, but without swords.

Universe is the Sun watching its own self.

There is much to discover that’s not on the back cover!

Mi čitamo knjige zato da bismo čitanjem proširili granice svog ličnog iskustva. Ako nam knjiga u tom pogledu ne daje apsolutno ništa, nijednog novog fakta, nijednog samostalnog pogleda, nijene originalne ideje, ako ničim ne pokreće...

…We now know the basic rules governing the universe, together with the gravitational interrelationships of its gross components, as shown in the theory of relativity worked out between 1905 and 1916. We also know the...

To be happy to be sad and sad to be happy is to sing an echo in that beautiful language called Sorrow.

I’ve been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.

Behind Tana there was the sounds of splintering wood, as though something very large had hot the door. “No,” she said softly, “Oh no. No.” “Leave me,” said Gavriel. …..”Shut up or I might,” she...

Well-wrought poems and works of imaginative literature can do for us what stone-cold prose can never do. They can help us grasp the full dimension of ways of life other than our own.

Literature is a virus.

a spider and a flyi heard a spiderand a fly arguingwait said the flydo not eat mei serve a great purposein the worldyou will have toshow me said the spideri scurry aroundgutters and sewersand garbage...

Literature is humanity’s broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It’s humanity without the judgement.

I started studying law, but this I could stand just for one semester. I couldn’t stand more. Then I studied languages and literature for two years. After two years I passed an examination with the...

The American girl isn’t ANY girl; she’s a remarkable specimen in a remarkable species.

It’s not lit, it’s literature. Lit is something a book can be, after you’ve decided to burn it. (I suggest you start the fire with my book.)

Books are a staircase to unknown worlds.

A midst deceit I found the truth;there in the rough I found a diamond.And from the moment we met,I think of no one elseToday I choose to be, to live and breathe;to dream, to weep,...

So long as there is gold underneath, who cares about the dust on top? Literature! That old whore! We must try to dose her with mercury and pills and clean her out from top to...

[…] as Kurt Vonnegut pointed out […] the literary novel has become extraordinarily privatistic of late. It’s as if the big issues (Does God exist? from whence springs decency? what sort of species is Homo...

I hated labels anyway. People didn’t fit in slots—prostitute, housewife, saint—like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.

Troja ist verfallen seit mehr als dreitausend Jahren. Homer lebt.

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn’t behave that way you would never do anything.

Literature is an ethical leap. It is a moral decision. A perilous exercise in constant failure. Literature should have grievances, because there are so many grievances in the world.

Literature offers the thrill of minds of great clarity wrestling with the endless problems and delights of being human. To engage with them is to engage with oneself, and the lasting rewards are not confined...

In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.

. . . you don’t need a happy ending to move onto a happy beginning.

‎Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure…but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our...

The committees scour the bookstores, printing and publishing houses, paying particular attention to secondhand bookstores. There, they requisition countless copies of ‘Incautious Maidens’ or ‘Flames at the Metropole.’ So that those who prefer the false...

The singular power of literature lies not in its capacity for accurate representation of mass commonalities, but its ability to illuminate the individual life in a way that expands our understanding of some previously unseen...

Although many things may still need to happen before you identify what your exact work will be, I know that every single person whom you’re meeting and every experience that you’re having is necessary to...

People are always saying these things about how there’s no need to read literature anymore-that it won’t help the world. Everyone should apparently learn to speak Mandarin, and learn how to write code for computers....

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with. That’s about all that can be said...

Ocean waves gently rock the boat,As if to the tune of a lullaby.She sits still as the boat silently floatsUnder the infinite blue sky.

Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn’t. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read.

Mind being the seat of the soul, and literature being the expression of the mind, literature, it follows, is the soul of an age, the surviving and immortal part of it.

Literature is a writer’s secret life recorded in symbols.