Literature Quotes
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I love writing for young people. It's the literature that was most important to me, the stories that shaped me and informed my own journey as a writer.
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The person that was closest to me growing up was my sister, who died at 19. She was an incredibly powerful girl, deeply committed to art and literature.
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Experience enables me to depose to the comfort and blessing that literature can prove in seasons of sickness and sorrow.
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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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What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons... we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless "Why?" and "What next?".
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I think the great artists, especially in literature, have always thought with the heart.
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I'm never going to be in danger of getting the Nobel Prize for literature.
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Have no regrets. Every relationship leads you to where you're meant to be. Learn to be comfortable with being alone. Learn to be comfortable with saying no to people; we put everybody else before ourselves. Read great literature; don't get all your information from TV. Define your moral code - nobody else is going to give you that. Find it yourself. Keep asking questions, keep challenging. You don't have to conform. Rebellion creates character. And, as my mother always said to me, "Don't let anyone break your spirit!"
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Music and literature have always and continue to be massive influences. Writers such as Seamus Heaney and Frank McGuinness. I have always admired the humanitarians that I knew growing up in Derry whose influence steered me in the direction of some of the work that I have chosen in the past.
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I have nothing but great respect for great scholars. But I was in grad school in the '80s and '90s, at the height of the theory craziness. It had a big part in why I ended up becoming a writer rather than a scholar, because I thought, "I just can't play these games." I was interested in literature because I loved literature, and so much of the theoretical positioning, at that moment 25 years ago, was antagonistic to literature. You know, trying to show that Jane Austen is a terrible person because she wasn't thinking about colonialism.
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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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All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
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My mother's father taught English literature. When I was about ten or eleven, I could recite Macaulay's 'Lays of Ancient Rome.' While other kids were playing pedestrian war games, I'd be Horatius keeping the bridge.
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But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.
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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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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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'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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I've always been interested in a certain kind of sophistication in children's literature. I loved Roald Dahl; I loved the underlying nastiness of some of his - darkness of his tales.
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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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Most of the famous love affairs of literature or film were quite short. What was 'Romeo & Juliet'? How long were they together? A few days.
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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.
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You're not getting the joy out of literature that it gave you. This is the danger of what we do. Look at Hemingway and so many others. You devote your life to one thing, that is what you are. It's artificial but it's all you have. If you lose it, then you're nothing and there's no point in going on.
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The dominant question for us with regard to literature has become, 'What does this have to do with me, with life as I know it?' That's the question answered by all these books about how Proust was actually a neuroscientist or how Proust can teach you emotional intelligence.
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To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.
