Literature Quotes
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I wanted to be involved with literature. I certainly wasn't going to be able to write for a living, and I didn't have enough confidence in my talent to think that I should be just doing that. Publishing seemed like fun to me - to be involved with writers. And it did turn out to be.
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I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.
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The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.
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... the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.
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Every generation looks at literature through the lens of their own experience, but with the Bible, everyone gets apprehensive and thinks it'll be too stuffy.
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Pop changes week to week, month to month. But great music is like literature.
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Margaret Atwood was the author who took me out of children's literature and guided me towards adult literature.
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There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.
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Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.
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One of the interesting things about the 'Decameron' itself was it was written in the Florentine dialect as opposed to the Latin vernacular - and that was mainly to have it be a piece of literature for the people as supposed to some kind of highfalutin' canon.
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Even the nonreligious may exercise aesthetic judgment in matters of religion, and indeed our age has given the unbelieving a sophisticated taste in religious literature.
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I can always tell when I'm about to start writing. I go through cycles in reading. When I'm beginning to start to write something, I start reading what I think of as good literature. I read things with wonderful language.
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If you get rid of music, images, videos, words and literature from the smartphone, you just have a simple phone that would be worth $50.
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I suppose it's true that most great television, literature, and other forms of high art (and basic cable) benefit from a little hindsight. 'M.A.S.H.' comes to mind. So does 'The Iliad.'
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How any person decides to emphasize strengths and mitigate weaknesses is something people have to figure out for themselves. I'm wary of the self-help literature that suggests there are certain rules. I'm very happy for people to look at my story and say it's possible to achieve many things.
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I'm drawn to the figure of the ungrateful subaltern as a trope in literature. In real life, it is often dangerous to demand more.
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In general, in poetry and literature, I am among those people who believe that too much is indispensable.
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It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.
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In America, the only truly popular art form is the movies. Most people consider painting a hobby and literature, schoolwork.
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My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.
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Romeo is the most misunderstood character in literature, I think. He's hardcore to play because he's displaying the characteristics of Hamlet at the beginning, and, well, then everything else happens.
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I don't feel like literature has the power to alienate. I think that's something people feel if they don't connect with a work of art. But I don't think a work of art can actively reject the person who's looking at it or reading it.
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Exciting literature after supper is not the best digestive.
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If literature (realistic) did really resemble life, it would be interminable, dreary, commonplace eating and dressing, buttoning, with here and there a patch of vividness. Life is composed of exquisite moments and the rest is shadows of them.
