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.

A midst deceit I found the truth;there in the rough I found a diamond.And from the moment we met,I think of no one elseToday I choose to be, to live and breathe;to dream, to weep,...

So long as there is gold underneath, who cares about the dust on top? Literature! That old whore! We must try to dose her with mercury and pills and clean her out from top to...

[…] as Kurt Vonnegut pointed out […] the literary novel has become extraordinarily privatistic of late. It’s as if the big issues (Does God exist? from whence springs decency? what sort of species is Homo...

I hated labels anyway. People didn’t fit in slots—prostitute, housewife, saint—like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.

Troja ist verfallen seit mehr als dreitausend Jahren. Homer lebt.

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn’t behave that way you would never do anything.

Literature is an ethical leap. It is a moral decision. A perilous exercise in constant failure. Literature should have grievances, because there are so many grievances in the world.

I am fit for nothing but literature.

There’s a German term- heimweh, homesickness. It’s a powerful sensation, like a narcotic. A yearning from home, but for something more- a past self, perhaps. A lost self. When I first saw you on the...

The best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a...

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.

En mi época no había Best-Sellers y no podíamos prostituírnos. No había quien comprara nuestra prostitución.

O homem que não lê não tem nenhuma vantagem sobre o homem que não sabe ler.

…with each new book of mine I have always the feeling that this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature.

Kein Philosoph würde ein dickes Buch schreiben, wenn er im Vornherein wüsste, auf welche Weise er später zitiert werden wird.

It wasn’t playing both sides of the fence – it was betting against yourself but still playing to win – and it encapsulated everything absurd and paradoxical that I loved about the French.

Writing poetry is a state of free float

Snatch religion back from the clerics and literature from the critics.

It was a wonderful experience. She mistrusted his very slumbers–and she seemed to think I could tell her why! Thus a poor mortal seduced by the charm of an apparition might have tried to wring...

That was always my fear, that perhaps books would lead me astray, teaching me about a life that didn’t match reality.

The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.

If you can’t focus then how do you expect to make your dreams come true?

Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.

The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasurable activity of mind excited...

Ésta es mi última transmisión desde el planeta de los monstruos. No me sumergiré nunca más en el mar de mierda de la literatura.

The great writings interact with one another. They cannot be read in isolation..

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.

History gives us the facts, sort of, but from literary works we can learn what the past smelled like, sounded like, and felt like, the forgotten gritty details of a lost era. Literature brings us...