A collection of quotes on and about literature.

 

"Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable."

Louisa May Alcott

 

"I am, really, a great writer; my only difficulty is in finding great readers."

Frank Harris

 

"I'm a good scholar when it comes to reading but a blotting kind of writer when you give me a pen."

J.M. Synge

 

"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."

G.K. Chesterton

 

“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”

G.K. Chesterton

 

"In youth men are apt to write more wisely than they really know or feel."

Nathaniel Hawthorne

 

“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.” 

Henry James

 

“There is no bond like having read and liked the same books.” 

Edith Nesbit

 

"The pleasure of all readings is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books."

Katherine Mansfield

 

“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”

Leo Tolstoy

 

"A book that furnishes no quotations is no book - it is a plaything."

Thomas Love Peacock

 

“The love of books is among the choicest gifts of the gods.”

Arthur Conan Doyle

 

"There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts."

Charles Dickens

 

“...the history of all love is writ with one pen.”

William Hope Hodgson

 

“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.”

George Bernard Shaw

 

"Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy."

F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

“A drop of ink may make a million think.”

Lord Byron

 

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."

Henry David Thoreau

 

“The books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful masters who never used me ill!”

Wilkie Collins

 

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

W. Somerset Maugham

 

“She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.”

W. Somerset Maugham

 

“There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.”

P.G. Wodehouse

 

“Through literature we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

 

“The first draft of anything is shit.” 

Ernest Hemingway