Literature Quotes
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Art and literature need extreme sociality to a degree that even dolphins don't have. We are the only large mammalian species that has such intense sociality. There are some small mammals that have become eusocial - the mole rats - but that's a different thing. Humans are able to understand one another at very high levels, to cooperate in very large groups. Humans depend on one another in ways that are an absolute precondition to sharing the kinds of information that makes narrative possible.
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Science and literature are both ways to ask questions about why we're here.
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Most British playwrights of my generation, as well as younger folks, apparently feel somewhat obliged to Russian literature - and not only those writing for theatres. Russian literature is part of the basic background knowledge for any writer. So there is nothing exceptional in the interest I had towards Russian literature and theatre. Frankly, I couldn't image what a culture would be like without sympathy towards Russian literature and Russia, whether we'd be talking about drama or Djagilev.
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In my writing, I try to combine all my favorite elements of journalism - accuracy, real characters that exist on this planet - with all my favorite elements of literature: a sense of flow, of propulsion, of wanting to read every sentence.
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There can be no great literature in America until her writers have learned to trust her implicitly and love her devoutly.
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One of the most insidious myths in American wine culture is that a wine is good if you like it. Liking a wine has nothing to do with whether it is good. Liking a wine has to do with liking that wine, period. Wine requires two assessments: one subjective, the other objective. In this it is like literature. You may not like reading Shakespeare but agree that Shakespeare was a great writer nonetheless.
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I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
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The actor who lets the dust accumulate on his Ibsen, his Shakspere [sic], and his Bible, but pores greedily over every little column of theatrical news, is a lost soul.
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Many of our ideas of democracy, so much of our literature and philosophy and science can be traced back to roots right here in Athens.
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This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.
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Modern Arabic literature achieved international recognition when Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel prize in 1988 (.....) Mahfouz also rendered Arabic literature a great service by developing, over the years, a form of language in which many of the archaisms and cliches that had become fashionable were discarded, a language that could serve as an adequate instrument for the writing of fiction in these times.
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Hindu religious literature, indeed all religious literature, is full of illustrations to prove the truth.
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I like the South: Southern literature and that relationship between grotesqueness and living below the Mason-Dixon line. But I also understand that people view it as a limitation - as an actor and as a person - perceptions that are really wrong: that you are ignorant and possibly illiterate, or that it's cute.
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A great speech is literature.
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Literature must become party literature. Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat.
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There are no new facts about the Kennedys, only new attitudes, a literature that, like the automobile industry, puts new bodies on old chassis.
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Real literature, like travel, is always a surprise.
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Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
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It would be hard to exaggerate Ernest Hemingway's influence over American literature, but his influence on our lives is probably larger still.
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How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
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In the same period, Polish literature also underwent some significant changes. From social-political literature, which had a great tradition and strong motivation to be that way, Polish literature changed its focus to a psychological rather than a social one.
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To be honest, I don't listen to much music! I've been so engrossed in it my whole life that when I drive around in my car, I'll listen to college lectures on philosophy and literature and world history, things like that, to kind of catch up on the college experience I missed.
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By the age of nine I had a thorough knowledge of contemporary Polish literature as well as of foreign literature in Polish translation, and I began to write poems in honour of a lady of thirty years. Naturally, she knew nothing about them.
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As for literature It gives no man a sinecure. And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy, There's nothing in it.
