Literary Landmarks Quotes

Writers are the main landmarks of the past.

I was on a walking tour of Oxford colleges once with a group of bored and unimpressable tourists. They yawned at Balliol's quad, T.E. Lawrence's and Churchill's portraits, and the blackboard Einstein wrote his E=mc2 on. Then the tour guide said, 'And this is the Bridge of Sighs, where Lord Peter proposed (in Latin) to Harriet,' and everyone suddenly came to life and began snapping pictures. Such is the power of books.

Living in New York City is one constant, ongoing literary pilgrimage. For 20 years, I lived among the ghosts of great writers and walked where they had walked.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

There ain't anything that is so interesting to look at as a place that a book has talked about.

I think most writers' houses are disappointing. What's much more atmospheric and interesting are the places they wrote about.

I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.

I don't care very much for literary shrines and hauntsI knew a woman in London who boasted that she had lodgings from the windows of which she could throw a stone into Carlyle's yard. And when I said, "Why throw a stone into Carlyle's yard?" she looked at me as if I were an imbecile and changed the subject.

It's like so great to be in Toronto and to see everything that's in the books and everything they reference and to be able to hang out in those places and go to those bookstores and those comic book stores and those music stores, and like have that, from the books onto the screen, is so cool and I'm glad to have been part of that.