I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nosebetween the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, wheras literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice...

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness....

A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is...

The instinct to impersonate produces the actor; the desire to provide pleasure by impersonations produces the playwright; the desire to provide this pleasure with adequate characterization and dialogue memorable in itself produces dramatic literature.

Let us be vulgar and have some fun, let us invite the President.

I plan on leaving my mark on this world, in ink, with a pen spill that’ll make all the oil spills combined look like literature.

A book can open the mind, free the heart, and speak to the soul.

La poesía, en un primer impulso, destruye los objetos que aprehende, los restituye, mediante esa destrucción, a la inasible fluidez de la existencia del poeta, y a ese precio espera encontrar la identidad del mundo...

Au début, je l’ai lu par curiosité, avec le sentiment de commettre une simple indiscrétion. Sans le savoir, j’étais comme la femme de Barbe-Bleue: j’ignorais quel monstrueux placard je venais d’ouvrir. Ce récit, je l’ai...

One of the best characters in English literature.

That’s sounds right. Another $5,000 went to dress up the Little League park where he had played so many games. Seems like he paid off the MORTAGE on his parents’ home, which wasn’t that much.

But oh my dear, I am tired of being Alice in Wonderland. Does it sound ungrateful? It is. Only I do get tired.

Literature, the act of writing, affirms life, however dark the story it tells.

When he, whoever of the gods it was, had thus arranged in order and resolved that chaotic mass, and reduced it, thus resolved, to cosmic parts, he first moulded the Earth into the form of...

Is Shimmer a floor wax or a dessert topping? Is an electron a wave or a particle? Slipstream tells us that the answer is yes.

I am fully conscious that, not being a literary man , certain presumptuous persons will think that they may reasonably blame me; alleging that I am not a man of letters. Foolish folks! do they...

Science may explain how humans came into being, but it has no answer to the slippery question of how humans should live. Only literature makes it possible to pose such questions in the first place....

Literature itself is a species of code. You line up symbols and create a simulacrum of life.

The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than...

When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn’t control what came through it.

For most of us free-thinking, wild hearts, our relationship with God or the Universe will go through peaks and valleys – transforming into new concepts and beliefs, completely disappearing, at times, only then to instantly...

Literature is capable of being a subject that people want to catch up on or discuss, whether at a coffee shop or a watercooler. It can become an intrinsic part of their dialogue.

Getting my legal situation fixed takes a bit longer than we all thought: twelve years to be exact. Not a big deal. Only most of my life.

There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.

es necesario tener claro que la literatura recoge del centro de la vida social e ideológica los contenidos más sensibles de las preocupaciones y los debates históricos, de ahí que resulte forzoso ubicarlos en el...

For a long time now a hint of aversion had lain on everything he did and experienced, a shadow of impotence and loneliness, an all-encompassing distaste for which he could not find the complementary inclination....

Although I love elegant parties, dancing and dining and spending the night with a sweet woman in my arms, my life belongs to literature.

Surely it is an odd way to spend your life – sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words...

Literature is integrated, and I’m not just talking about color or race. I’m talking about the power of literature to make us recognize – and again and again – the wholeness of the human experience.

When the critic has said everything in his power about a literary text, he has still said nothing; for the very existence of literature implies that it cannot be replaced by non-literature

I held Angie Luna in that room for hours, and I remember the different times we made love like epochs in a civilization, each movement and every touch, apex upon abyss. In the luxury of...

Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to...

He pries me from his chest and drops his hand from the back of my head, tracing my ear, along my jawline. He snatches his fingers a moment before they press into my lip.

I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all...

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.

Great novels are above all great fairy tales . . . literature does not tell the truth but makes it up.

I know that I am a small, weak man, but I have amassed a large library; I dream of dangerous places.

Oh? And what’s so stinking about it?.

He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods; the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.

To be stories at all they must be a series of events: but it must be understood that this series – the plot, as we call it – is only really a new whereby to...

WE ARE the PULSE of the TIMES!

Howard adores Sam’s looks. He loves the strong cut of jaw made satin with thickening peach fuzz, loses himself in the green eyes. Howard stares at them like a lover, but always obliquely. (Sometimes we...

En uzun yaşayan, en çok yaşayan değildir.

My fingers burn behind the keys of my typewriter, the lettering fading with every thoughtful strike. The many words I write I dare not stall; my mind perpetually alert for my magnum opus call.

Kisslikeyouneverhada past.

I realize that people still read books now and some people actually love them, but in 1946 in the Village our feelings about books–I’m talking about my friends and myself–went beyond love. It was as...

Había leído lo bastante como para apreciar mi ingenio literario, pero no lo bastante como para identificar mis fuentes de conocimiento. Me encantan las mujeres así. Podía decirle cosas como: “La principal diferencia entre la...

He knows he will be born again, And start fresh anew.

In trying to be perfect, He perfected the art of anonymity, Became imperceptible And arrived nowhere from nowhere.