It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel...

From what you didn’t say, lies that you did say.

To not say all that can be said is the secret of discipline and economy.

There are many secrets; don’t try to resolve them all.

Disease often comes with a smiling face.

A smiling lie is a whirlwind, easy to enter, but hard to escape.

There seemed no reason why she shouldn’t try writing something in between, but she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same – you couldn’t just soak it up and then...

Hold your pen and spare your voice.

Anybody may blame me who likes, when I add further, that, now and then, when I took a walk by myself in the grounds; when I went down to the gates and looked through them...

Fantastic literature has been especially prominent in times of unrest, when the older values have been overthrown to make way for the new; it has often accompanied or predicted change, and served to shake up...

Curioso: tal como el escritor selecciona un género -muchas veces no por voluntad propia, sino por las afinidades, las inclinaciones, los gustos- en el cual se siente a sus anchas, lo mismo sucede con el...

His voice had a faint trace of an accent she couldn’t place – one that made her pretty sure he was no local kid infected the night before-Tana on Gavriel-page 21-chapter 3

Why would a book in which hardly anything happened for most of the time eat at me so much? It was the weirdest thing

Sleep is death enjoyed.

It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier for a...

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

All literature and popular art contain themes that resonate with the audience.

Before he went away, he had heard all about the self-made girl, and there was something in the picture that strongly impressed him. She was possible doutbless only in America; American life had smoothed the...

a lover of love.

Dacă nu-i vezi lacrimile unui om, nu înseamnă că el nu pl nge pe ascuns în sufletul lui.

It’s a special form of scholarly neurosis,´ said Camel. `He’s no longer able to distinguish between life and literature.´

To return to antiquity [in literature]: that has been done. To return to the Middle Ages: that too has been done. Remains the present day. But the ground is shaky: so where can you set...

Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it’s made truly. The thing...

After all, tomorrow is another day!

What do I miss, as a human being, if I have never heard of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? The answer is: Nothing. And what do I miss by not knowing Shakespeare? Unless I get...

I don’t think that, when future generations look at the apartheid struggle, they will see it as quite the momentous literary cauldron that recent history has suggested. In fact, as well as recording the struggle...

Maybe its because i rejoice over what i have and don’t grieve over what i don’t have”.

In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the novels. She had read any number of them, from...

The principle of art is to pause, not bypass. The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke. This requires a moment of pause–a contract with yourself through the object you look...

Genuine bravery for a writer…. It is about calmly speaking the truth when everyone else is silenced, when the truth cannot be expressed. It is about speaking out with a different voice, risking the wrath...

What are we doing out there in the world?

We do literature a real disservice if we reduce it to knowledge or to use, to a problem to be solved. If literature solves problems, it does so by its own inexhaustibility, and by its...

I think imagination is at the heart of everything we do. Scientific discoveries couldn’t have happened without imagination. Art, music, and literature couldn’t exist without imagination. And so anything that strengthens imagination, and reading certainly...

In a sense, Joyce was Beckett’s Don Quixote, and Beckett was his Sancho Panza. Joyce aspired to the One; Beckett encapsulated the fragmented many. But as each author accomplished his task, it was in the...

Literature enables us to see our world and ourselves more clearly, to understand our lives more fully.

What good literature can do and does do—far greater than any importation of morality—is touch the human soul.

As night falls silently all around,She carefully turns the last page.

A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

It was a time I slept in many rooms, called myself by many names. I wandered through the quarters of the city like alluvium wanders the river banks. I knew every kind of joy, ascents...

I learned that books are never finished, that it is possible for stories to go on writing themselves without an author.

To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.

It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language,...

He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers....

I can relate to Marguerite Duras even though I’m not French, nor have I been consumed by love for an East Asian man. I can life inside Alice Munro’s skin. But I can’t relate to...

The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is as if the little bird which flew through the Anglo-Saxon banqueting hall, in...

Words are instruments, they are tools that, in their different ways, are as effective as any sharp edge or violate chemical. They are, like coins, items of great value, but they represent a currency that,...

I shall tell you what I believe. I believe God is a librarian. I believe that literature is holy…it is that best part of our souls that we break off and give each other, and...

There is only one school of literature – that of talent.

Many people don’t realize the connection between music and literature and I’m here to tell them that it does exist!