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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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.
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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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Happiness is understanding that friendship is more precious than mere things, more precious than getting your own way, more precious than being in situations where true principles are not at stake.
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It's bad enough that you have to take market risk. Only a fool takes on the additional risk of doing yet more damage by failing to diversify properly with his or her nest egg. Avoid the problem-buy a well-run index fund and own the whole market.
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Your reader is at least as bright as you are
