Literature Quotes - Page 159

Literature exists so that where one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterward live finely

I'm pulling out, and I'm going to concentrate every ounce of time and energy over the next week working to defeat the recall because I realize now that's the only way to defeat Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In Holland, things were pretty stale for me. Even though there were a lot of good influences and a certain openness to music and art and literature, I just wanted to go somewhere less familiar - somewhere bigger.

A fellow oughtn't to let his family property go to pieces.

It is, of course, traditional in children's literature to get rid of the parents.

It was delightful but, of course, it was pretty insulting to my professional reputation.

While the 1980 book was being serialized in the Sunday Times, Charles attacked it through the Observer.

As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.

That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed in his literature. One cannot doubt that the martyrdom will continue to be gladly embraced. To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters.

In literary history, generation follows generation in a rage.

The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.

Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.

Representative institutions are as much a part of the true Briton as his language and his literature.

I never think about the actual process of writing. I suppose I have a superstition about examining it too closely.

My writing day has grown shorter as I've aged, although it seems to produce the same number of pages.

I forget a book as soon as I finish writing it, which is not always a good thing

When I read, I'm purely a reader

I'm too shy for personal appearances, and I've found out that anytime I talk about my writing, I can't do any writing for many weeks afterward.

I expect that any day now, I will have said all I have to say; I'll have used up all my characters, and then I'll be free to get on with my real life.

For my own family, I would always choose the makeshift, surrogate family formed by various characters unrelated by blood.

I consciously try to end my novels at a point where I won't have to wonder about my characters ever again.

I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.

I feel like an outsider, and I always will feel like one. I've always felt that I wasn't a member of any particular group.

You can look at the New York Times Bestseller List and you can be pretty sure that the writers on that list don't know each other very well.

I'm fascinated by almost any mythology that I can get my hands on...