William Maxwell Quotes

Your reader is at least as bright as you are

William Maxwell

• Literature
• Reader

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Quotes to Explore

• What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

  

  E. M. Forster
  • Great
  • Man
  • Literature

• 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.

  

  V. S. Naipaul
  • Friends
  • Man
  • Nice

• 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.

  

  Nathaniel Philbrick
  • American
  • Dad
  • Jesus

• The adolescent protagonist is one of the hallmarks of American literature.

  

  Tayari Jones
  • American
  • Literature

• It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race.

  

  Lafcadio Hearn
  • Work
  • English
  • Language

• 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.

  

  Nathan Myhrvold
  • Great
  • Girl
  • Boy

• I have the feeling of being a very small item on this planet, and literature enables me to express that.

  

  J. M. G. Le Clezio
  • Feeling
  • Small
  • Me

• 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.

  

  J. M. Coetzee
  • Mind
  • Strong
  • Culture

• Literature is memory written down. All literature is memory.

  

  Wayne Grady
  • Literature
  • Memory
  • Down

• I was just as voracious a writer as I was a reader.

  

  Iris Johansen
  • Writer
  • Just
  • Reader

• 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.

  

  Talulah Riley
  • Literature
  • Pride
  • Books

• Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.

  

  F. Sionil Jose
  • People
  • Past
  • Literature

• 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.

  

  Gail Carriger
  • Literature
  • Movement
  • Fantasy

• 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.

  

  Patch Adams
  • Music
  • Culture
  • Literature

• 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.

  

  Lafcadio Hearn
  • True
  • Poetry
  • Literature

• I first encountered Bradbury's writing when I was pretty young. He's a great bridge author between young-adult fiction and literature.

  

  Sam Weller
  • Great
  • Writing
  • Pretty

• I love the way you can fall in love with a piece of literature; how words alone can get your heart doing that.

  

  Laura Marling
  • Heart
  • Love
  • Words

• 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.

  

  Taiye Selasi
  • People
  • Politics
  • Literature

• My own duty as a teacher...is not so much to interpret Beethoven, Wagner, or other masters of the past, but to give what encouragement I can to the young musicians of America. I...hope that just as this nation has already surpassed so many others in marvelous inventions and feats of engineering and commerce, and has made an honorable place for itself in literature in one short century, so it must assert itself on the...art of music...To bring about this result, we must trust the very youthful enthusiasm and patriotism of this country.

  

  Antonin Dvorak
  • Music
  • Country
  • Art

• He who meanly admires a mean thing is a snob--perhaps that is a safe definition of the character.

  

  William Makepeace Thackeray
  • Character
  • Mean
  • Admire

• Alone in a world, With millions of souls Walking in circles Trapped in their dreams unhealthy, unclean walking in circles, now do not disturb scream in silence everyone's sleeping.

  

  Chester Bennington Linkin Park
  • Alone
  • Silence
  • Circles

• I've been told I'm too good looking for certain roles, but that's okay, it just motivates me to go deeper.

  

  Garrett Hedlund
  • Good
  • Me
  • Certain

• We're charged by Congress with regulating financial institutions. We take that mission seriously. We are tough supervisors and regulators.

  

  Janet Yellen
  • Financial

• Your reader is at least as bright as you are

  

  William Maxwell
  • Literature
  • Reader