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

Half of all the great art and literature in existence went unrecognised during the lifetimes of its creators.

The worst feature of the Common Core is its anti-humanistic, utilitarian approach to education. It mistakes what a child is and what a human being is for. That is why it has no use for...

I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, or how lonely the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer...

And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder, as if someone or something had ‘walked over our grave,’ as if a memory had suddenly been rescued...

There were the usual exhortations to purity – think of the novel not as your opportunity to get rich or famous but to wrestle, in your own way, with the titans of the form –...

Yeryüzünde her şeyi öğrenemezsin. Ne yaparsan yap, yine bir budala olarak ölürsün.

Yeryüzü küresinin neresinde mutlu olabileceğinizi nereden bilebilirsiniz? Ve mutsuz olacağınızı? Bunu bilebildiğini kim iddia edebilir?

My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads.

It is right that you should read according to your temperament, occupations, hobbies, and vocations. But it is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar, unwilling to explore the unfamiliar....

[Lulu is launching the Blooker – whose name is an affectionate nod to another important literary prize – as a global contest to mark the 450th anniversary this year of Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type...

You not only are hunted by others, you unknowingly hunt yourself.

A word only writes Its night and ridesIts dream.

To transform a grimace into a sound sounds impossible, yet it is possible to transform a vision into music, to go outside an enslaved personality, to become impersonal by transforming into sand, into water, into...

Through everything I have passed but nowhere I have been.

From everything, nothing looks to nothing.

Without nothing, everything would be nothing.

A word into the silence thrown always finds its echo somewhere where silence opens hidden lexicons.

Although all days are equally long regardless of the season, some days are long not only seasonally but by rewards they offer.

The deeper thought is, the taller it becomes.

Absolute equals nothingness.

My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.

They were both young men under thirty. Art is not so precocious as literature, and does not send quite so many early potatoes into the market, so that the age of thirty is considered young...

Literature is the extant body of written art. All novels belong to it.The value judgement concealed in distinguishing one novel as literature and another as genre vanishes with the distinction.Every readable novel can give true...

Von allen Abenteuern ist Selbstmord das literarischste, mehr noch als Mord.

To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.1010 One has only to spend a term trying to teach college literature to realize...

I’ll be your Dostoevsky, if you’ll be my Tolstoy. Our life together will be so full of despair that death will be like a gulag full of joy.

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

Harrogate saw them going along Blount Avenue Sunday morning. They wore outfits all cut from the same bolt of cloth and in the church pew standing six across they looked like a strip of gaudy...

I wish the military were the militerary. Less fighting and more reading.

There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.

I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.

No institution of learning of Ingersoll’s day had courage enough to confer upon him an honorary degree; not only for his own intellectual accomplishments, but also for his influence upon the minds of the learned...

Sunday is the golden clasp that binds together the volume of the week.

Basketbol takımındakiler birbirlerini tutuyor, Katolikler birbirlerini tutuyor, lanet entellektüeller birbirlerini tutuyor, Ayın Kitabı Kulübüne üye olan herifler bile birbirlerini tutuyor.

Language can’t describe reality. Literature has no stable reference, no real meaning. Each reader’s interpretation is equally valid, more important than the author’s intention. In fact, nothing in life has meaning. Reality is subjective. Values...

Everyone in this tale has a rock-solid hamartia: hers, that she is so sick; yours, that you are so well. Were she better or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed,...

As usual, it struck me that letters were the only really satisfactory form of literature. They give one the facts so amazingly, don’t they? I felt when I got to the end that I’d lived...

Be a reader for a lifetime. Read, read more!

When your share your story with someone, it becomes their story too.

I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.

Het was een vergissing vanwege de juf, te denken dat alleen de dingen die in de boeken staan interessant zijn. Ook deze, die er nog niet in staan, zijn merkwaardig.

I am about tribal feminine power. As a leader, I may stumble but my essence lives to the future– of my people, of my literature, of my art. And when a tribesman turn against its...

The first prerequisite for fine literature is that the writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must struggle with to...

Und ehe ich mich’s versah, da war’s um mich geschehen. Ich war glücklich – wohl zum ersten Mal in meinem Leben. Ein extremes, ein unheimliches Gefühl hatte mich befallen und überwältigt. Ich war verliebt. Halb...

Mag sein, daß für manche die Literatur die angenehmste Art ist, das Leben zu ignorieren, wie Fernando Pessoa einmal geschrieben hat.

A stubborn refusal of the conditions of 20th Century ‘reality’, surrealism has denied intransigently and consistently that modern man can live without a sense of wonder at the world that was once embodied in myth....

Your passions don’t have to connect to one another and no one needs to sign off on them. Passion isn’t logical… it’s only the fuel which keeps our souls alive. Let it be that simple.

Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.

There is only one motive for writing a novel: to be published and read. To me there is no distinction between the mystery novel and the novel, only between good books and bad books. A...