William Maxwell Quotes
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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I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.
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After Brown, I went to Duke, to a Ph.D. program in American literature. My dad's an English professor. After a year there, I was like, 'Jesus. I don't want to do this. I don't want to be in the library.' So I pulled the ripcord, and that was it.
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The adolescent protagonist is one of the hallmarks of American literature.
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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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I have the feeling of being a very small item on this planet, and literature enables me to express that.
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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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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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I'm a big reader, so when I was in 'Pride and Prejudice,' or, like, in Poirots and Marples, those are all books that I loved, and so it was really exciting for me to inhabit characters from literature that I knew and recognized.
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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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To me, steampunk and urban fantasy are naturally hinged together. And I think that's because I love the early gothic Victorian literature, and both things spring from that movement.
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I first came to Russia because of the culture, literature and music... and my interest in the 19th-century revolutionary spirit of Herzen, Bakunin and Kropotkin. Russia is a wonderful place to bring new clowns because Russians give back a wonderful response.
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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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I first encountered Bradbury's writing when I was pretty young. He's a great bridge author between young-adult fiction and literature.
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I love the way you can fall in love with a piece of literature; how words alone can get your heart doing that.
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So often, literature about African people is conflated with literature about African politics, as if the state were somehow of greater import or interest than the individual.
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There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.
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As a writer, I live in the world of literature and ideas, but I entered that world as an emigre from a medieval fiefdom, the sports world of Michigan.
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Joan Didion's 'The Year of Magical Thinking' comes to mind as an example of a piece of media that I really respect and would hope to emulate: just her courage in looking at her husband's death and the attentiveness that she has in how she looks at it, and the unflinching gaze that she communicates from looking into death.
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Universal background checks work. You keep the guns out of the hands of dangerous people. That shouldn't be partisan - that should be something we can all agree to, but it became this huge battle and, you know, really, really a challenge.
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Miracles are signs not to them that believe, but to them that believe not.
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Your reader is at least as bright as you are
