Literature Quotes
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Literature is my calling To hold up the mirror to my countrymen comes natural to me; and in the open field of invention I am not without hopes of giving them pleasure.
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I read world literature and I read French romances in the originals. I had quite a profound knowledge - no, that sounds conceited, but I did have a profound interest in everything spiritual.
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Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.
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I am in the interesting position of being sometimes skimmed by the critics and called literature and sometimes called historical fiction.
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Sedgwick has managed to convert pedestrian critical skills and little discernible knowledge in history, philosophy, psychology, art or even pre-modern literature into a lucrative academic career.
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I personally was driven to be an actor for the love of telling a story. It was very closely linked to being a reader as a kid and being transported by literature and art. It had nothing – zero – to do with anything resembling fame.
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Oh, I'm terribly ignorant of Czech literature. It's disgraceful really.
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In all this process of acquiring conceptions, a certain instinctive order is followed. There is a native tendency to assimilate certain kinds of conception at one age, and other kinds of conception at a later age.
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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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In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit an harmonious design or an inspirational tone.
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The real difference between literature and pulp is the kind of emotional responses they elicit. Dan Brown can't pierce your heart. Patricia Cornwell can't make you read a sentence twice and then look sightlessly out of the window.
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Like many works of literature, Hollywood chooses for its villains people who strive for social dominance through the pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power. But the ordinary business of capitalism is much more egalitarian: It's about finding meaning and enjoyment in work and production.
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I just totally do not believe in this sort of Bart Simpson character who infects so much of our literature and film and TV stuff nowadays, these know-it-all kids who seem to understand the hypocrisy of the adult world so thoroughly and can talk about it with such articulateness. That's bunk.
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I feel like elements of race and identity and ethnicity are sort of missing in all of literature, not just in women's literature.
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What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.
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One reason I've never been a fan of graphic novels is because a central aspect of literature for me has always been imagining what the things I'm reading about look like.
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There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.
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It amazes me how a person to whom literature means anything can take it up as an object of study.
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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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I'm not into high literature, but I think all my books are literate.
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I have a masters in African-American literature, and I got a Ph.D. in American Literature. I spent a number of years teaching as a professor in the university system. Then I turned forty and decided I was going to be the woman I wanted to be!
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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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Literature is the history of the soul.
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As it was, I realized choosing the study of Chinese literature as my life's work was probably a mistake.
