Literature Quotes
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Literature is, in fact, the fruit of leisure.
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I think my books give people a language to have a conversation about God that's not religious. There isn't enough new literature that brings the conversation of God into a modern context. I love the Bible, but in the West we've analyzed it until it fits into a structure of control. We need more new stories. We need different ways of looking at things, and I think it's coming.
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Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land; Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand.
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There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.... the essay must be pure--pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.
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Through engagement with others, literature lets us imagine what it would be like to be differe.
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The history of literature is the history of the human mind. It is, as compared with other histories, the intellectual as distinguished from the material, the informing spirit as compared with the outward and visible.
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If you look at the recent Nobel Prize winners, one couldn't say that the work didn't matter and the political commitment did. Who had ever heard of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz? He is not politically involved. Octavio Paz is a great poet, also not politically involved. The Nobel Prize is for literature, for the quality of work over the years.
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Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.
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All great literature has an uncreeded and luminous theology behind it... Art [is] a form of active prayer.
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I often say I've spent more time with photography than I have with literature just in terms of hours.
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I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much.
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Absurdly improbable things are quite as liable to happen in real life as in weak literature.
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I hope to be remembered for writing books about social justice that also have enough aesthetic value to endure as works of literature.
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There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on how one looks at it.
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Mr. McGregor's a nasty piece of work, isn't he? Quite the Darth Vader of children's literature.
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Before college, I hadn't voluntarily read anything that might be called literature; I didn't think I'd understand it; I never seemed to understand my English teacher's interpretations of what we read.
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Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.
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There are a handful of people whom money won't spoil, and we all count ourselves among them.
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Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art.
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Without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer.
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It is courage, courage, courage, that raises the blood of life to crimson splendor. Live bravely and present a brave front to adversity
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All of my education at Harvard, then Oxford, then Paris was in literature - even my thesis was on Shakespeare.
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The entire routine of our memorized acquisitions, for example, is a consequence of nothing but the Law of Contiguity. The words of a poem, the formulas of trigonometry, the facts of history, the properties of material things, are all known to us as definite systems or groups of objects which cohere in an order fixed by innumerable iterations, and of which any one part reminds us of the others.
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No work of literature is the product of only one or two conscious ideas. A story is mysteriously dense of meaning.
