"Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one."
— Terry Pratchett

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!"
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"Lord Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?
Hamlet: Between who?
Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord."
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young."
— Maya Angelou

"There must have been moments even that afternoon whe Daisy tumbled short of his dreams--not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness."
— George Washington

"My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure."
— Gene Wolfe

"Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?"
— Donna Tartt (The Secret History)

"A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle..."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life."
— Aristotle (Aristotle's Poetics)

"It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been borht with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!"
— Ralph Ellison

"For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, and in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man's distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: 'This tower is most interesting.' But they also said (after pushing it over): 'What a muddle it is in!' And even the man's own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: 'He is such an odd fellow! Imagine using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? he had no sense of proportion.' But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (Beowulf and the Critics)

"Human beings do not live forever [...], less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So we may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?

I learned a long time ago, that the blink of an eye is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. The span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that span with meaning, so that its quality is immeasurable, though its quantity may be insignificant. A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life.

It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning. [...] A life full of meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here."
— Chaim Potok (The Chosen)

"Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art."
— Susan Sontag

"They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction.

'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all.'"
— John Champlin Gardner Jr. (Grendel)

"Unless their use by readers bring them to life, books are indeed dead things."
— Lawrence Clark Powell

"Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control."
— Robert Bringhurst (The Solid Form Of Language: An Essay On Writing And Meaning)

"Wrote all day—and my story is still incomplete."
— Florence Wolfson

"About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone."
— Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse)

"To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength."
— Lawrence Clark Powell

"The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting."
— Henry James

"... 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 Sapiens?) were either settled or not worth discusssing, and serious writers should therefore confine themselves to their various ethnic heritages and interpersonal relationships."
— James Morrow (Nebula Awards 27)

"To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture."
— Oscar Wilde

"There is nothing political about American literature."
— Laura Bush

"Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant."
— Lawrence Clark Powell

"I sometimes used to ask myself, what on earth did I love her for? Maybe fore the warm hazel iris of her fluffy eyes, or for the natural side-wave of her brown hair, done anyhow, or again for that movement of her plump shoulders. But, probably the truth was that I loved her because she loved me. To her I was the ideal man: brains, pluck. And there was none dressed better. I remember once, when I first put on that new dinner jacket, with the vast trousers, she clapsed her hands, sank down on a chair and murmured: 'Oh, Hermann...." It was ravishment bordering upon something like heavenly woe. "
— Vladimir Nabokov

"The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose."
— Christopher Hitchens

"The text contains no literary criticism. I wanted to describe books, not to be clever at their expense."
— Kenneth McLeish (Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide)

"Mas, não obstante, eu acrescento que em qualquer pensamento genial ou no novo pensamento humano, ou simplesmente até em qualquer pensamento humano sério, que medra da cabeça de alguém, sempre resta algo que de maneira nenhuma se pode transmitir a outras pessoas, embora voc6e tenha garatujado volumes inteiros e passado trinta e cinco anos interpretando o seu pensamento; sempre restará algo que de maneira alguma desejará sair do seu crânio e permanecerá com você para todo o sempre; e assim você acaba morrendo sem ter transmitido a ninguém talvez o mais importante da sua idéia."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Idiot)

"One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer."
— Anne Fadiman (At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays)

"I sometimes used to ask myself, what on earth did I love her for? Maybe for the warm hazel iris of her fluffy eyes, or for the natural side-wave of her brown hair, done anyhow, or again for that movement of her plump shoulders. But probably the truth was that I loved her because she loved me. To her I was the ideal man: brains, pluck. And there was none dressed better. I remember, once, when I first put on that new dinner jacket, with the vast trousers, she clasped her hands, sank down on a chair and murmured: 'Oh, Hermann....' It was ravishment bordering upon something like heavenly woe."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"Two adolescent girls on a hot summer night--hardly the material of great literature, which tends to endow all male experience (that of those twin brothers who found themselves adrift so many years ago in the dark northern woods for instance) with universal radiance. Faithless sons, wars and typhoons, fields of blood, greed and knives: our literature's full of such stories. And yet suppose for an instant that it wasn't the complacent father but his bored daughter who was the Prime Mover; suppose that what came first wasn't an appetite for drama but the urge to awaken it. Mightn't we then permit a single summer in the lives of two bored girls to represent an essential stage in the history of the universe?"
— Kathryn Davis

"Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad."
— Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim and The Rachel Papers)

"I should point out, creating one's own style, as much as is required to illustrate one of the aspects, the golden seam of language, involves beginning again at once, in a different manner, adopting the guise of a pupil when one risked becoming pedantic - thus by a shrugging of one's shoulders, disconcerting some with their genuflecting stance, and immortalizing oneself in multiple, impersonal, or even anonymous forms in response to the gesture of arms raised in stupefaction."
— Stéphane Mallarmé (Mallarme in Prose)

"Critical thinking does seem a superior sort of thinking because it seems as though the critic is actually going beyond the scope of what is being criticized in order to criticize it. That is only rarely a true assumption because, most often, the critic will seize on some little aspect that he or she understands and tackle only that."
— Edward De Bono (I Am Right You Are Wrong: From This to the New Renaissance: From Rock Logic to Water Logic)

"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 fatídico Axel, por terem desequilibrado tão artisticamente as faculdades da menina Agnes. As mulheres levemente desequilibradas se qualificam como musas excelentes."
— Günter Grass (The Flounder)

"The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance."
— Barthes Roland (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography)

"How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot find their way home. India knows of their trouble. She knows of the whole world's trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls "Come" through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal."
— E.M. Forster (A Passage to India)

"The entire act open to us, forever and alone, consists in seizing, while we're waiting, the rare or multiple links, according to some inner state and what we can hear when we try, thus simplifying the world. This is what equals the art of creation: the notion of an object, escaping, that we need."
— Stéphane Mallarmé