Complex Literature Quotes

There are so many books I want to read. Difficult books. That's what I intend to do and what I'm longing for.

I've had a tough time with Pynchon. I liked him very much when I first read him. I liked him less with each book. He got denser and more complex in a way that didn't really pay off.

To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.

My favorite books are actually very complicated - 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', 'Ulysses'.

I find it's impossible for me to read Proust.

My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic.

Anyone who sets foot into the 'Watchmen' universe and isn't just a little nervous should be given a few days of electroshock therapy. I've always considered 'Watchmen' to be one of the best graphic novels ever written, and when it came out back in 1986 I was as blown away as everyone else. Just masterful.

'The Duino Elegies' are notoriously cryptic, and part of the reason why I have always loved them is because they invite multiple readings over the course of a lifetime.

I never really liked "cool" books. I plowed through as much Borges and Joyce as possible, read the first half of V. and spent whole Bar Mitzvah checks on Beat poetry.

And it's impossible for me to read Henry James.

I am reading Henry James...and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.

I just can't read, the way other people can, these tediously elaborated books.

Every few years, I think, 'Maybe now I'm finally smart enough or sophisticated enough to understand 'Ulysses.' So I pick it up and try it again. And by page 10, as always, I'm like, 'What the hell?'

There are interesting forms of difficulty, and there are unprofitable forms of difficulty. I mean, I enjoy some difficult poetry, but some of it is impenetrable and I actually wouldn't want to penetrate it if I could, perhaps.

I still think reading something like 'Ulysses' takes a tremendous investment of time, but it repays all of it with so much interest.

I'm not over-enamored of complicated books, and wonder if it's more for the author's ego than anything else?

Sometimes, readers, when they're young, are given, say, a book like 'Moby Dick' to read. And it is an interesting, complicated book, but it's not something that somebody who has never read a book before should be given as an example of why you'll really love to read, necessarily.

I don't think anyone wants a reader to be completely lost - certainly not to the point of giving up - but there's something to be said for a book that isn't instantly disposable, that rewards a second reading.

'Habibi' is a complex and unapologetic work of fantasy - no idle undertaking for readers of any faith or no faith at all, but one well worth the trouble.

I'm mainly an airport author, and if you're trying to take your mind off the journey, you're not going to read 'King Lear.'

Some things in literature are inexplicable.

Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.