You battled monsters. You sweat and cried your way to this one prolific moment where you finally realize that those dark days and sleepless nights were pre-requisites to your becoming.

There’s a different flavor to children’s literature you read after you grow up than there was reading it as a child. Things that were sweet as a child become bitter once you grow up.

Don’t patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he’s stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.

One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which...

A myth is something that has never happened, but is happening all the time.

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with...

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...

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...

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

Since the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart, and a host of others have shown that this religious dimension can be experienced and communicated apart from any religious context. But that is no reason for closing my...

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among...

Growing up, I loved the tale of Peter Rabbit and also books on Pippi Longstocking. Pippi was a girl who had so much fun and was very daring. My sons loved all the Dr. Seuss...

Toute grande oeuvre est soit une Iliade soit une Odysée, les odysées étant beaucoup plus nombreuse que les iliades: le Satiricon, La Divine Comédie, Pantagruel, Don Quichotte, et naturellement Ulysse (où l’on reconnaît d’ailleurs l’influence...

Reagan’s failure to become a truly great movie star has been ascribed to project menace, sexuality, or even moral ambiguity.

Cuando empezaron a decir que la literatura norteamericana no existía y que la inglesa era mala, perdí la compostura y les dije que la literatura española merecía estar en el retrete, colgada de un clavo...

… 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...

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...

The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.

In the only sense that matters the surprise works as well the twentieth time as the first. It is the quality of unexpectedness, not the fact that delights us. It is even better the second...

Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path. I shall be a...

Fiction though it is a fiction, should be written in a way that it feels like a reality, a reality every reader willingly or sometimes unwillingly goes through, until the reader finishes reading and sometimes...

Tis true what Hemingway says–if we’re lucky enough to live our dreams in youth, as Ernest Hemingway did in 1920’s Paris and I did with the Beat poets, then youth’s dreams become a moveable feast...

Gençken evlenmek için zaman çok erkendir; yaşlandığınızda da çok geç.

The word ‘NO’ is the best motivation there is for the storyteller in you.

I believe that children in this country need a more robust literary diet than they are getting. …It does not hurt them to read about good and evil, love and hate, life and death. Nor...

For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his...

Las autobiografías ya de por sí son infumables, ¡pero anda que las novelitas! Héroe emprende viaje, forastero llega a la ciudad, alguien persigue algo, lo consigue o no lo consigue, conflicto entre voluntades opuestas. “Admiradme,...

Everything that looks too perfect is too perfect to be perfect.

We love the imperfect shapes in nature and in the works of art, look for an intentional error as a sign of the golden key and sincerity found in true mastery.

Courage is more important than to be deceived by shallow victory waiting for a delayed defeat.

The Postmodernists’ tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.

Nothing is part of everything.

Why poetry, you ask? Because of life, I answer.

Tell me something only you know and make a new friend.

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.