Literature Quotes
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With English literature, if you do a bit of shonky spelling, no one dies, but if you're half-way through a maths calculation and you stick in an extra zero, everything just crashes into the ravine.
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If you focus on literature through only one small element of it, like the more scientific element of linguistics, then where is the joy that brought us literature in the first place, which is to have a story?
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I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.
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The message of guidance that neither politics nor philosophy nor religion now seems able to provide, we look for in modern literature.
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Contemporary literature in the West has shown some signs of ethical change.
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The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery.
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Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.
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I had the impression from reading English literature that British women were great beauties, and I only had seen Julie Christie, and she was gorgeous and sexy. I don't know whether it was just my taste, but when I got to London, I went two years without seeing a truly attractive woman. A lot of near misses.
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Take the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or beauty or form, we are borrowers.
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I studied English literature; I took 2 independent religion classes, but I wasn't a religion major really.
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Sartre said that wars were acts and that, with literature, you could produce changes in history. Now, I don't think literature doesn't produce changes, but I think the social and political effect of literature is much less controllable than I thought.
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When you kill somebody in the movies, it matters, whereas in literature it can be allegorical.
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Sex, like art, can unsettle a soul, can grind a heart in a mortar. Sex, like literature, can sneak the other within one's wall, even if only for a moment, a moment before one immures oneself again.
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Literature, like memory, selects only the vivid patches.
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While in some countries there's a feeling that literature must stay away from religion, this is not so in India - in the Indian way, literature is just another means to find a more spiritual life, to find our way to God.
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In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read.
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There's all this stuff that is happening in Edinburgh now, it's a sad attempt to create an Edinburgh society, similar to a London society, a highbrow literature celebrity society.
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A great piece of literature does not try to coerce you to believe it or agree with it. A great piece of literature simply is. It is a vehicle of truth, but it is not a blueprint, and we tend to confuse the two.
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A poem is one undivided unimpeded expression fallen ripe into literature, and it is undividedly and unimpededly received by those for whom it was matured.
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Without the imaginative insight which goes with creative literature, history cannot be intelligibly written.
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Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.
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I think that Poe is so resonant because he represents that part of us that is in misery or sorrowful or wants to explore the darkness. He wrote a great story called 'The Imp of the Perverse' about the instinct towards self-destruction. Poe is the godfather of Goth literature and that whole movement.
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All prizes have a role, if they are run with integrity and with a clear focus on reading and quality writing. I don't think any of them is necessary, but they all play an incredibly important role in building a body of literature, in introducing new authors to new readers, and extending reading.
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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.
