Todo éxito es una apología de lo vulgar. Cualquier libro que rebasa los cien ejemplares es un fracaso para el buen gusto. ,O qué habría de pensarse de un mismo libro leído simultáneamente por cien...

In the dream, Tana’s mother loved her more than anyone or anything. More than death.-Tana-page 21-chapter 4

This heart is a hurricane, turbulent with ache screaming winds of grief waiting to make the skyfall, to pluck the cloudsfrom their beds with itswhipping winds

When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.

The best thing about being a writer is that ‘work’ is always something you love, plus usually accompanied by tea, coffee and cakes of some sort.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the...

No matter how strong you are, you cannot hold open the jaws of a great-white shark with your bare hands… that can do your brain.

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

Enjoying a cup of coffee and a good book, is there anything better? Only if literature were liquid and drinkable.

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on...

The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting...

No se piensa en nada; las horas pasan. Uno se pasea inmovil por paises que cree ver, y su pensamiento, enlazandose a la ficcion, se recrea en los detalles o sigue el hilo de las...

writing home”here in the wilderness of australiawriting home becomes easyin spite of the spreading wild firesthere is less heat, more certainty.writing home, writing thisi think of those without real homes–our city, people say, provides houseswhich...

Life was not easy, nor was it happy, but she did not expect life to be easy, and, if it was not happy, that was woman’s lot. It was a man’s world, and she accepted...

Literature for me… tries to heal the harm done by stories. (How much harm? Most of the atrocities of history have been created by stories, e.g., the Jews killed Jesus.) I follow Sartre that the...

Life really is a story, and every story comes to an end. At the same time, it seems we all leave in the middle of our own stories. It’s who we become that gives the...

If a teacher has only love for the cause, it will be a good teacher. If a teacher has only love for student, as a father, mother, he will be better than the teacher, who...

…apparently “London” gave out my address! that’s what they’re saying…not just London, though! Brazzaville, too!…and said that I’m a dirty pornographer…a letch besides being the most despicable traitor of the century!…I’d make a urinal blush!...

When you’ve got a thing to say, Say it! Don’t take half a day.When your tale’s got little in itCrowd the whole thing in a minute! Life is short–a fleeting vapor–Don’t you fill the whole...

It is difficult to call myself a writer, even when I stand at a podium to receive a prize, I feel uncomfortable calling myself a writer—I am merely a word criminal.

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.”[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk...

Do you realize that all great literature — “Moby Dick,” “Huckleberry Finn,” “A Farewell to Arms,” “The Scarlet Letter,” “The Red Badge of Courage,” “The Iliad and The Odyssey,” “Crime and Punishment,” the Bible, and...

After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing to the literature of the 20th Century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A+ B, a clear-sighted, sickly literature....

To become a ‘good reader’ one must give oneself over to a regime of concentrated pleasure. One does not set out to read a book a day (there is no necessary pleasure in that) but...

… she was a pudding of immaturity and precocious wisdom that had not yet set into a stable mold.

A word aptly uttered or written cannot be cut away by an axe.

Human beings don’t necessarily exist inside of (or correspond to) the neat racial, gendered or national boxes into which we often unthinkingly place them.It’s a mistake to ask literature to reinforce such structures. Literature tends...

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

I’ve only been to jail a few times, but in several different countries, at that. No, I’ve only been to jail a few times. But I still claim the ability to write a “serious” novel.

An unhappy ending makes it literature rather than romantic fiction.

You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin , or even vagueness – ignorance, credulity – helps your enjoyment of...

If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the...

Ivanov had been a party member since 1902. Back then he had tried to write stories in the manner of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, or rather he had tried to plagiarize them without much success, which...

Monsters are real and ghosts are real too they live inside us and sometimes they win.

To my fellow writers’ I say, ‘Write. Build an imaginary world like nobody’s watching.

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...

The whole world’s writing novels, but nobody’s reading them. We need readers. More readers. Fewer writers.

lessons from life,” is embedded in all literature.

No. She reads literature.

You can be good for the mere sake of goodness; you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it...

Ah benim Dündar öğretmenim! Ah benim gazetelerim, liselerim,kaymakamlarım, babalarım, ağabeylerim, k h Alman, k h Amerikankılıklı askerlerim, çocuk yüzlü halkevlerim, ‘ Bir Türk bir dünyayabedel’lerim, marşlarım, heykellerim, Alman yengelerim ve ‘Tout va trèsbien Madame la...

The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in ones own home.” Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The...

Her köyde onu ayakta tutan bir doğru vardır.

Bu büyük orucu niçin gereksiyoruz? Niye? Oruç, hem de büyük. Ama buna ne ihtiyacımız var? Demka bir türlü anlamıyordu; çünkü o, yaşantısının büyük bölümünü aç karınla geçirmişti.

Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuéesQui hante la tempête et se rit de l’archer;Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.

La buena literatura es un arte que alimenta el alma.

Literature should stand by itself, of itself, and for itself.

To risk life to save a smile on a face of a woman or a child is the secret of chivalry.

God is busy and has no time for you.