Leland Ryken Quotes

The Bible is not just one book, but an entire library, with stories, songs, poetry, letters and history, as well as literature that might more obviously qualify as 'religious.'

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

The Bible is not only laws, it's also stories.

The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.

No one ever became, or can become truly eloquent without being a reader of the Bible, and an admirer of the purity and sublimity of its language.

Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.

As an undergraduate, I had not studied literature - I was a history major.

I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority.

What's funny about Jesus' Son is that I never even wrote that book, I just wrote it down. I would tell these stories and people would say, You should write these things down.

The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.

The New Testament evinces its universal design in its very, style, which alone distinguishes it from all the literary productions of earlier and later times.

The Bible is worth all the other books which have ever been printed.

I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.

The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

The Bible is not a history book.

Bible is more reliable than tradition

You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.

There's no reason why a writer shouldn't explore and use different genres.

I'm no longer religious, but the Bible fascinates me. Hardly anyone reads it anymore, but it's got everything: it's a book of poetry, it's a book of principle, it's a book of stories, and of myths and of epic tales, a book of histories and a book of fictions, of riddles, fables, parables and allegories.

Even if you aren't a believer, there are incredible stories in the 'good book' that I guarantee you will keep you glued to the page. The Bible is no less a part of our cultural heritage than Shakespeare is - and by the way, Shakespeare's plays are absolutely loaded with Biblical references.

There are two classes of authors: the one write the history of their times, the other their biography.

In what light soever we regard the Bible, whether with reference to revelation, to history, or to morality, it is an invaluable and inexhaustible mine of knowledge and virtue.

I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.

The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.

Everything that's prose isn't verse and everything that isn't verse is prose. Now you see what it is to be a scholar!