Literature Quotes
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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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Augustine's description of Ambrose's silent reading (including the remark that he never read aloud) is the first definite instance recorded in Western literature.
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I didn't know much about Texas when I moved there for graduate school. In my first or second semester, I took a class in life and literature of the Southwest, and that's where I first heard about these events along the border in 1915-1918, what Anglos called the Bandit Wars.
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Since 'Huckleberry Finn,' or thereabouts, it seemed that all American literature was about the alienated hero.
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Governments are suspicious of literature because it is a force that eludes them.
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There's definitely a culture of Russian literature in Turkey. And in the U.S. too, to an extent - especially Dostoevsky.
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A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate.
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Had I not gone to Japan in 1986, had I stayed home and majored in English literature as I'd intended to do, I might indeed have become an investment banker, an outcome that perhaps would have proved a more severe blow to the health of the U.S. economy than to the history of the novel.
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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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Literature has always been a part of my life. I studied history and literature in college. My mother is a novelist; I grew up around books.
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A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug.
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I also really liked playing Mr. Tumnus in 'Narnia'. I got to play my favorite character in children's literature, which I loved. You don't get the chance to do that in other jobs.
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The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.
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It's a great thing when you feel that you recognize yourself, deeply and movingly, in a work of literature.
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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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I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own.
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Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.
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Literature is the history of the soul.
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'Invisible Man' holds such an honored place in African-American literature that Ralph Ellison didn't have to write anything else to break bread with the remembered dead. But he did try to go on, because if a writer has done one great thing, then the pressures to do another are intense.
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A great piece of literature does not try to coerce you to believe it or agree with it. A great piece of literature simply is. It is a vehicle of truth, but it is not a blueprint, and we tend to confuse the two.
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in a sense much great literature is subversive, since its very existence implies that what matters is art, imagination, and truth. In what we call the real world, on the other hand, what usually counts is money, power, and public success.
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There is a broad cultural current that conveys the idea that a film is like a football team, it represents a nation, it is illustrated literature, filmed radio. These are outdated concepts, totally out of touch with today's realities.
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Criticism can be wonderful, especially in making connections in an interpretive way. But by applying theories randomly, it's an interesting exercise, but I don't think it illuminates the literature.
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The Brothers Karamazov is the most magnificent novel ever written; the episode of the Grand Inquisitor, one of the peaks in the literature of the world, can hardly be valued too highly.
