#literature

"Language is a finding-place not a hiding place."

"To risk life to save a smile on a face of a woman or a child is the secret of chivalry."

"For a game, you don’t need a teacher."

"Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism."

"Literature is the real life of imaginary people."

"Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time."

"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."

"The bullet that has hit us Muslims today left the gun centuries ago when we let the clergy decide that knowledge and education were not important."

"There can be no forced inspiration."

"I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language."

"The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder."

"In general there should be gay characters in YA because a) surprise, there are gay folks everywhere and b) in my opinion as a father, there’s not a damn thing wrong with my child encountering gay folks in her literature, because see point a)."

"There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured."

"The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary."

"I never want you to deny anything about yourself because you have grown up thinking it’s unacceptable or inconvenient for the people around you."

"Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination."

"Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself."

"So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone."

"Life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly. Literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for us to endure nobly."

"A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is."