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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What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
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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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There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.
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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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Octavia Butler often described herself as an outsider, but within science fiction, she was loved as an insider, someone who was a fan first and came to S.F. writing as an enthusiastic reader.
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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 did not go to any creative writing workshop; I did not major in literature. If I can write, anyone can write. All it needs is imagination.
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I'm not writing great literature. I'm writing commercial fiction for people to enjoy the stories and to like the characters.
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Hopefully, reading and being around great literature inspires me to write songs, but I'm not sure about that.
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The lack of literature on the topic was a handicap, but my great teacher, Elvin Semrad, had taught us to be skeptical about textbooks. We had only one real textbook, he said: our patients. We should trust only what we could learn from them—and from our own experience.
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I think every school in the world should have a sports program.
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I started to sing after high school, and I may have dreamed about being Randy Travis a time or two.
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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.
