Books Quote by Cynthia Ozick

I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books a supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of…

— John Green

“Just as the universal family of gifted writers transcends national barriers, so is the gifted reader a universal figure, not subject to spatial or…

— Vladimir Nabokov

“He believes that if talent is demanded of a literary publisher or a writer, it must also be demanded of a reader. Because we…

— Enrique Vila-Matas

“All novels are impossible. We would not wish to read them if they were not. Can you imagine how dull a tale would be…

— Caitlin Williams

“Every stylistic excess and moral defect which critics conspired to ignore in the author's first books, LANARK and UNLIKELY STORIES, MOSTLY, is to be…

— Alasdair Gray

To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great…

— Virginia Woolf

What care I if it be "wild and improbable" and "lacking in literary art"? I refuse to be any longer hampered by such canons…

— Anonymous

Most books fail, not so much from a want of ability in their authors, as from an absence in their productions of a thorough…

— Christian Nestell Bovee

“The true reader must be an extension of the author. He is the higher court that receives the case already prepared by the lower…

— Novalis

The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters.

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Theres always an anxiety about playing literary characters because one of the great joys of reading books is that you can create your own…

— Stephen Mangan

Few faults of style, whether real or imaginary, excite the malignity of a more numerous class of readers, than the use of hard words.

— Samuel Johnson