Literature Quotes
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Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.
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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.
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I just wish we knew a little less about his urethra and a little more about his arms sales to Iran.
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When I was young my Father used to tell me that the two most worthwhile pursuits in life were the pursuit of truth and of beauty and I believe that Alfred Nobel must have felt much the same when he gave these prizes for literature and the sciences.
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In the theatre we reach out and touch the past through literature, history and memory so that we might receive and relive significant and relevant human qualities in the present and then pass them on to future generations.
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Eroticism is born at a time in civilisation when sexual instinct becomes deanimalised and enriched with contributions from art and from literature. A world of theatricality emerges around the act of love.
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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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Confidence is highly overrated when it comes to creating literature. A writer who is overly confident will not engage in the struggle to get it exactly right on the page - but rather, will assume that she's getting it right without the struggle.
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The road that led me to literature was very different from the one followed by my fellow writers in Poland.
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Full disclosure: I went to university as an eager young feminist for many reasons - to get away from my parents, to soak up literature and knowledge, to cease being a child, to expand my mind and my world.
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I didn't choose literature. Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side.
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The difference between farce and humour in literature is, I suppose, that farce strums louder and louder on one string, while humour varies its note, changes its key, grows and spreads and deepens until it may indeed reach tragic depths.
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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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You can't live for literature. You can't live for the job.
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Literature is dangerous: it awakens a rebellious attitude in us.
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I think it is a mistake to identify a movie according to its language, as if movies were literature.
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In the old days of literature, only the very thick-skinned - or the very brilliant - dared enter the arena of literary criticism. To criticise a person's work required equal measures of erudition and wit, and inferior critics were often the butt of satire and ridicule.
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I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.
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First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.
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I think that literature is something that embraces a much larger experience than politics. It's an expression of what is life, of what are all the dimensions of life. But politics is one among others.
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While art thrives on the blazing colours of scandal, literature blossoms on the dark soil of tragedy.
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Thinking - in particular abstract thinking, which most of us are introduced to through the study of mathematics and literature - helps us learn that we can become problem solvers.
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This, indeed, is one of the eternal paradoxes of both life and literature-that without passion little gets done; yet, without control of that passion, its effects are largely ill or null.
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A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books.
