Colin Wilson Quotes
I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider. If I was offered anything like the Nobel Prize for Literature, I'd find it an extremely difficult conflict because I'd be basically disinclined to accept.
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 had a major bug for cities and for paintings and literature and all the things I thought went on in cities.
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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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Although by 1851 tales of adventure had begun to seem antiquated, they had rendered a large service to the course of literature: they had removed the stigma, for the most part, from the word novel.
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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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I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.
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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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Female characters in literature are full. They're messy: they've got runny noses and burp and belch. Unfortunately, in film, female characters don't often have that kind of richness.
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Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?
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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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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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Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.
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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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Time the great destroyer of other men's happiness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its possessor.
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With some exceptions in science fiction and other genres I have small difficulty in avoiding anything that could be called American literature. I feel it is unnatural, not I think entirely because it uses a language that is not mine, however closely akin to my own.
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If it were possible to meet the Beloved while laughing and in a state of comfort, why should one suffer the anguish of separation?
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When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.
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I understand what happens to the brain when people are near death, and I had always believed there were good scientific explanations for the heavenly out-of-body journeys described by those who narrowly escaped death.
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You only can rest when have the truth, even when it's horrible.
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I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider. If I was offered anything like the Nobel Prize for Literature, I'd find it an extremely difficult conflict because I'd be basically disinclined to accept.
