"But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm."
— Virginia Woolf

"He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."
— Rafael Sabatini (Scaramouche)

"As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye."
— John Milton (Areopagitica)

"In fact I don't think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you're born is simply an accident of fate. I don't see why I shouldn't be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn't born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

"A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean. If my drawing, on the other hand, is so far from being a work of art that it needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, what can it matter that neither you nor your child should know what it means? It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning. If it do not even wake an interest, throw it aside. A meaning may be there, but it is not for you. If, again, you do not know a horse when you see it, the name written under it will not serve you much. At all events, the business of the painter is not to teach zoology."
— George MacDonald (The Light Princess and Other Fairy Stories)

"When a friend of Abigail and John Adams was killed at Bunker Hill, Abigail's response was to write a letter to her husband and include these words, "My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.""
— David McCullough (John Adams)

"Every now and then, I'm seized with an overwhelming urge to say something like "As Marcel Proust would say.." but of course I have no idea what Marcel Proust would say so I don't even go there. I could do, uh, "As Michael Crichton would say.." but it's not exactly the same you know."
— Lorelai Gilmore

"No one hath seen beauty in its highest lustre who hath never seen it in distress."
— Henry Fielding (Tom Jones (Wordsworth Classics))

"Every now and then, I'm seized with an overwhelming urge to say something like "As Marcel Proust would say.." but of course I have no idea what Marcel Proust would say so I don't even go there. I could do, uh, "As Micheal Crichton would say.." but it's not exactly the same you know. "
— Lorelai Gilmore

"They never opened the door which leads to the soul."
— Henry Miller

"کاش
قناری می فهمید زندگی پرواز نیست"
— Mohammad Hossein Khosh Bayan

"I wonder how the book got to Guernsey? Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers."
— Juliet Ashton

"He has a mind so fine that no idea could violate it."
— T.S. Eliot

"The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form."
— Jacques Barzun (From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present)

"This was a lucky recollection-it saved her from something like regret."
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"Style in painting is the same as in writing, a power over materials, whether words or colors, by which conceptions or sentiments are conveyed.
"
— Joshua Reynolds

"Yes, I hate orthodox criticism. I don't mean great criticism, like that of Matthew Arnold and others, but the usual small niggling, fussy-mussy criticism, which thinks it can improve people by telling them where they are wrong, and results only in putting them in straitjackets of hesitancy and self-consciousness, and weazening all vision and bravery.

...I hate it because of all the potentially shining, gentle, gifted people of all ages, that it snuffs out every year. It is a murderer of talent. And because the most modest and sensitive people are the most talented, having the most imagination and sympathy, these are the very first ones to get killed off. It is the brutal egotists that survive."
— Brenda Ueland (If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit)

"The significant difference between Proust and Faulkner, for Sartre, is that where Proust discovers salvation in time, in the recovery of time past, for Faulkner time is never lost, however much he may want, like a mystic, to forget time. Both writers emphasize the transitoriness of emotion, of the condition of love or misery, or whatever passes because it is transitory in time. "Proust really should have employed a technique like Faulkner's," Sartre legislates, "that was the logical outcome of his metaphysic. Faulkner, however, is a lost man, and because he knows that he is lost he risks pushing his thoughts to its conclusion. Proust is a classicist and a Frenchman; and the French lose themselves with caution and always end by finding themselves."
— John McCormick

""All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their mings.""
— Virginia Woolf

"[N]o such thing as objective writing, . . . every inscription, every traveler's tale, every news account, every piece of technical writing, tells more about the author and his time than it does about the ostensible subject."
— Sue Hubbell (Waiting for Aphrodite: Journeys into the Time Before Bones)

"Make not your tale of accidents too full
Too much variety will make it dull
Achilles' rage alone, when wrought with skill,
Abundantly does a whole Illiad fill.

"
— Nicholas Boileau 17th Century literary critic

"A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways-by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art. It is the presence of art in Crime and Punishment that moves us deeply rather than the story of Raskolnikov's crime."
— Boris Pasternak (Doctor Zhivago)

"Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time.
Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!"
— Roman Payne (Cities & Countries)

"All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us who knew her felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness."
— Toni Morrison

"Many of our critics read literature like totalitarian cops on the lookout for subversive material -- for instance, the claim that there is a world outside language."
— Charles Simic (The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs)

"The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination."
— Charles Simic (The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs)

""Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed."
"
— alxander pope

""Make not your tale of accidents too full
Too much variety will make it dull
Achilles' rage alone, when wrought with skill,
Abundantly does a whole Illiad fill."

"
— Nicholas Boileau 17th Century literary critic