Literature Quotes
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Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.
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Letting ourselves down in some fashion is such an integral part of daily life that the paucity of literature on the subject is baffling.
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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 always play with everybody,' said Honoré. 'It is my vocation. God put me on the earth to do with people what cats do to mice. Play with them, chew the last bit of life out of them, them pick them up in my mouth and drop them on people’s doorsteps. That is the business of literature.'
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Though [Abraham Lincoln] never would travel to Europe, he went with Shakespeare's kings to Merry England; he went with Lord Byron poetry to Spain and Portugal. Literature allowed him to transcend his surroundings.
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I have many books that I want to write; I'd like to think that I'll be around for another 20 years or so and write another dozen novels, probably some sort of imaginative literature... Never again another seven-volume saga.
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I think the class divide is going to change. I think a lot more working class people are going to get published. It is really class ridden, literature.
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The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.
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My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul.
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Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.
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Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.
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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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Many science fiction writers are literary autodidacts who focus on the genre primarily as a literature of ideas rather than as a pure art form or a tool for the introspective examination of the human condition. I'm not entirely at ease with that self-description.
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Some people think memoirs should be held to a perfect journalistic standard. Some people don't. Obviously I don't. My goal was never to create or to write a perfect journalistic standard of my life. It was always to be as literature.
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Art and literature should help us to get out of our mental cocoons.
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All men are not created equal but should be treated as though they were under the law.
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If you covet fame, if you covet all the superficial accolades, you're gonna be miserable 'cause you're never going to get enough praise. If you covet contributing something substantive to movies, music, literature, then you won't be unhappy.
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Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do - it can make us identify with situations and people far away.
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Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.
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Nations are born in the hearts of poets, they prosper and die in the hands of politicians.
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L. Frank Baum 'Philadelphia North American', (3 October 1904), as quoted by 'Map of Kansas Literature' Washburn.edu.
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A taste for the best reading is not cultivated in Spanish girls, even where the treasures of that great Castilian literature are accessible to them.
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As a children's author, you get to advocate for reading and writing in general, in a way an adult author might not be able to. It's a really interesting dance we do to get literature into the hands of young people and to help them to become literate and become readers; we want them to grow up reading and continue to do so when they're adults.
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I think respectful conflict is intrinsic to the spirit of literature. It reminds us that literary history is living and evolving and thrives on us being active participants.
