Books Quote by Oscar Wilde

One should not be too severe on English novels; they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.

— Oscar Wilde

“I’m sure there are people who are content to run errands and report for work on time and wait, with an enlivening eagerness, for…

— Michael Cunningham

“Eventually, we come to love certain novels because we have expended so much imaginative labor on them. This is why we hang on to…

— Orhan Pamuk

“There is no such thing as an 'unemployed writer', only an unemployed mind”

— Kevin Cowdall

“Yet I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me: a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong…

— Doris Lessing

“Our job, then, is two-fold: to focus on our own failings as writers. But also to speak more forcefully as advocates for literature. Books…

— Steve Almond

“It takes an enormous amount of work to complete a novel, and each of the students who completed the course has accomplished something many…

— Daniel Schwabauer

“If living is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of…

— Jane Smiley

“Though I have been busy, perhaps overbusy, all my life, it seems to me now that I have accomplished little that matters, that the…

— Wallace Stegner

“...an irresistible of why we read and why we love. We are not quite novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end,…

— Gabrielle Zevin

“The English major is, first of all, a reader. She's got a book pup-tented in front of her nose many hours a day; her…

— Mark Edmundson

One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.

— Jonathan Lethem