#literature

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

"Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness."

"At the end of the day your ability to connect with your readers comes down to how you make them feel."

"A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo."

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."

"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!"

"Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay."

"I'd probably want to teach at university, because children would drive me insane. I suspect it would be English literature, Shakespeare and so forth. I've always been deeply, deeply in love with that kind of thing."

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

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

"Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them."

"In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes."

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

"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."

"Since there is no real silence, Silence will contain all the sounds, All the words, all the languages, All knowledge, all memory."

"Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head."

"I regained my soul through literature after those times I'd lost it to wild-eyed gypsy girls on the European streets."

"Literature is my Utopia"

"I always thought it was Mo Be Dick. I know Mo, and he is a dick."

"Without books, the world will be void."