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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Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.
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I'll try anything. What are they gonna do, kick me out of show business?
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Kafka is one of my very favorite writers. Kafka's fictional world is already so complete that trying to follow in his steps is not just pointless, but quite risky, too. What I see myself doing, rather, is writing novels where, in my own way, I dismantle the fictional world of Kafka that itself dismantled the existing novelistic system.
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I'm a great fan of Carey Lowell's and I loved Jill Hennessey.
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Basing our happiness on our ability to control everything is futile.
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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.
