Quotes about Literature

Sang Ly, we are literature—our lives, our hopes, our desires, our despairs, our passions, our strengths, our weaknesses. Stories express our longing not only to make a difference today but to see what is possible for tomorrow. Literature has been called a handbook for the art of being human. So

Literature is a cake with many toys baked inside- and even if you find them all, if you don't enjoy the path that leads you to them, it will be a hollow accomplishment....'They knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.

Does everything always have to mean something else?" I ask before we get started. Who knew that literature was so tangled and complicated? "That is a wonderful lesson, Sang Ly. Remember it." "What was it again?" I ask, not certain to what she was referring. She repeats it for me. "In literature, everything means something.

Our trials, our troubles, our demons, our angels—we reenact them because these stories explain our lives. Literature's lessons repeat because they echo from deeper places.

But literature is unique. To understand literature, you read it with your head, but you interpret it with your heart. The two are forced to work together—and, quite frankly, they often don't get along.

January 8 has been a lucky day for me. I have started all my books on that day, and all of them have been well received by the readers. I write eight to ten hours a day until I have a first draft, then I can relax a little. I am very disciplined. I write in silence and solitude. I light a candle to call inspiration and the muses, and I surround myself with pictures of the people I love, dead and alive.

This is the kind of detail that is forbidden in literature; in a book, no one would dare combine a full moon with Frank Sinatra. The problem with fiction is that it must seem credible, while reality seldom is.

I fell in love with my country because of the stories my grandfather told me and because of our travels together through the south. He taught me history and geography, showed me maps, made me read Chilean writers, corrected my grammar and handwriting. As a teacher, he was short on patience but long on severity; my errors made him red with anger, but if he was content with my work he would reward me with a wedge of Camembert cheese

'Sartor Resartus' is simply unreadable, and for me that always sort of spoils a book.

You will write better letters, you will converse better, you will enjoy social intercourse better if you read helpful reading matter from books and read newspapers very sparingly.

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.

Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.