Ryszard Kapuscinski Quotes
This is the most intimate relationship between literature and its readers: they treat the text as a part of themselves, as a possession.
Quotes to Explore
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Secret families are really the bedrock issue of Western literature.
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I get upset about what is taken as great literature and what is cute and exotic.
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The idea behind a dish - the delight and the surprise - makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn't just 'Here's the facts - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.' It's how you tell it.
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Journalism students need to understand it and need a solid background in the liberal arts, in sociology, economics, literature and language, because they won't get it later on.
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Literature is memory written down. All literature is memory.
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I was just as voracious a writer as I was a reader.
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When I first stepped into literature twenty-five years ago, I wanted to work on behalf of the oppressed, the working masses, and it seemed to me, mistakenly, that I would not find them among the Jews.
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Chinatown is tremendously interesting... It's a part of the city that hasn't really been explored in crime literature or in any general literature. It's as though Chinatown didn't exist. People write about New York without mentioning Chinatown at all.
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It's not about what you tell the reader, it's about what you conceal.
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The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives.
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Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.
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It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.
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Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.
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The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.
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I founded a club, which is called the Brutally Early Club. It's basically a breakfast salon for the 21st century where art meets science meets architecture meets literature.
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Well documented, the relationship of literature to myth in the Western world has undergone much change over the millennia, as first the age of gods fell away before the notion of a single god, and then, for many people, that single god slipped away, too.
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Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination of the heart.
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If you tell certain people that you like Kerouac, they assume that’s all you read, like you don’t know anything else about literature. I recognize all the things that people dislike about the way he writes - his tone and the sentimentality of it all. But those books were there for me at a very important point in my life.
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I don't think that we are completely dominated by what we have inherited from the past, but it is the case that as far back as you can go - just to Homer, but also to the literature of Rome, the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance - what you will find is that women's voices are not taken seriously.
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I had never read Victorian novels before going overseas. I read a handful of authors, but I had not immersed myself in the literature of the 19th century.
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I feel lucky every day. But I can also trace that luck back to decisions I have made. Frequently, those decisions have been to pay my own way to somewhere I want to be and something I want to do.
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The tears I have cried over Germany have dried. I have washed my face.
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Presidents come and go, and even parties come to and away from power. But the main policy tack does not change.
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This is the most intimate relationship between literature and its readers: they treat the text as a part of themselves, as a possession.
