Your head is a lit chamber.

The world is a fairy tale; we are its guardians.

But it seems to me inevitable that any person who gives thoughtful and imaginative attention to literature must be awakened in his sensibilities, enlarged in his sympathies, sharpened in his critical faculties.

And literature frequently rises to heights that make it international.

Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honours or of wealth.

I had never kissed a boy, had never even considered that I might enjoy such an unclean thing, until literature opened my eyes.

Literature shrivels in a universal language, and an uprooted language rots before it dies. And it should be possible to lift the eyes above the cant of the ‘language of Shakespeare’… sufficiently to realise the...

A great book allows me to leap over that wall: in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness, I feel human and unalone.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.

The literature hardly helps. You remember it only when you are well, healthy, and in a positive state of mind. And you tend to blame your circumstances and people around you for the outcome of...

Resta-nos esclarecer a parte que nesse golfo fantástico cabe ao imaginário indireto, ou seja, o conjunto de imagens que a cultura nos fornece, seja ela cultura de massa ou outra forma de tradição. Esta questão...

Zola’nın italyan kökeni bile bir aşağılama nedeni olur. Bir gazeteci “Yarı-İtalyan, çeyrek Yunan, çeyrek Fransız, üç-dört kez kırma, hiç de güzel bir insanlık örneği değil!” diye yazar.

… I don’t know what to say.’‘That’s okay. Sometimes talking is like singing in a storm.’‘Like when you’re scared?’‘Exactly.’‘Or when you’re sad?’‘That too. A voice can be reassuring.

They were readers for whom literature was a drug, each complex plot line delivering a new high, suspending them above reality, allowing them a magical crossover…They had spoken often, with rueful honesty, of how the...

You can’t memorize poetry and stay a fake. Sooner or later, you start to understand what these poets are saying, and it makes you feel life has something quite special, with certain layers of meaning...

Bu iki rahibenin bana Katolik olup olmadığımı sormadıklarına bu nedenle memnun olmuştum. Sorsalardı, konuşmamız berbat olmazdı, ama ben de herhalde farklı davranırdım.

Eles não podem agir de outra maneira, os senhores da criação. O privilégio da criação lhes é irrenunciável. Nós, mulheres, temos que ser criaturas, sim, e criaturas perfeitas. Sejamos agradecidas aos cavaleiros suecos, principalmente ao...

He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

Il (Georges Perros) arrivait le mardi matin, ébouriffé de vent et de froid sur sa moto bleue et rouillée. Voûté, dans un caban marine, la pipe à la bouche ou dans sa main. Il vidait...

I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long...

O, great wise man,’ she said, ‘I have been wondering so many things. Is life more than sitting at home doing the same thing over and over? Wise man, is life more than watching one’s...

Who is the most worthy of admiration, musician or audience?Probably the musician will tell that his audience and the musician that his audience

Jane believes me, don’t you Jane?

A fear of the unknown: what was that called?Worse yet: a fear of the known.

Gormenghast. Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracts. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet beats away from...

We all have a book in us. The first step is recognising this. Writing it is a whole new journey.

The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement.

Jonah-John-if I had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah still-not because I have been unlucky for others, but because somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places, at certain times,...

Even if we try to conform to ideals and strive for perfection, we will always be pulled back to our core identity because it’s the path of least resistance for our souls – an energy...

Of four infernal rivers that disgorge/ Into the burning Lake their baleful streams;/Abhorred Styx the flood of deadly hate,/Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep;/Cocytus, nam’d of lamentation loud/ Heard on the rueful stream; fierce...

It’s the best way of telling the truth; it’s a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts. Beyond that … [it’s] delight in, and play with,...

You’re like, both like, Alexander the Great.’We can’t both be Alexander.’Well sometimes I think you’re two side of the same coin, and I’m the metal in between.

So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea.

…This remains the great deficiency of literature: its imitation of nature cannot prepare you for the main events. For the main events, only experience will answer.

…but which of us has read every line of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or The Divine Comedy, or Paradise Lost? Only men of epic stomach can digest these epic tales.

Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent

In life there are two things which are dependable. The pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of literature.

Yet when books have been read and reread, it boils down to the horse, his human companion, and what goes on between them.

Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age...

You must remember that no one lives a life free from pain and suffering.

Literary works are not democracies. We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal. We may, but the country of Novels, Etc., doesn’t. In that faraway place, no character...

everything that is scatteredcomes together in wordseverything that is lostcomes back in poetry.

the whole of Victorian literature done up in grey paper & neatly tied with string

To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what...

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so...

Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.

Misfortune is needed to plumb certain mysterious depths in the understanding of men; pressure is needed to explode the charge. My captivity concentrated all my faculties on a single point.

I like my coffee with cream and my literature with optimism.

I wonder whether, perhaps without realizing it, we seek out the books we need to read. Or whether books themselves, which are intelligent entities, detect their readers and catch their eye. In the end, every...

As Borges himself showed us in so many stories — “The Aleph”, “The Garden of Forking Paths”, “The Gift”, “Blue Tigers”, “Shakespeare’s Memory” — a blessing is always a mixed blessing.As Borges noted sadly, he...