Literature Quotes
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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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When I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for fiction writing, I felt both coveted and hated. My white classmates never failed to remind me that I was more fortunate than they were at this particular juncture in American literature.
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I've always said that music is like 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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Through engagement with others, literature lets us imagine what it would be like to be differe.
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Pop music, across its countless iterations, is a vast, amazing, thrilling art form. All life is in it. It stands for itself. The same is true of literature, but nobody feels compelled to toss Philip Roth a grammy just to prove it.
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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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Chess is my profession. I am my own boss; I am free. I like literature and music, classical especially. I am in fact quite normal; I have a Bohemian profession without being myself a Bohemian. I am neither a conformist nor a great revolutionary.
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Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.
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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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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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Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.
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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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Literature has drawn a funny perimeter that other art forms haven't.
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Life is rather above the measure of us all (save for a very few perhaps). We all need literature that is above our measure--though we may not have sufficient energy for it all the time.
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We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous.
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Woolf is an important writer for me, someone I read often and who forms part of my ideal of what literature can do.
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I made a compact with myself that in my person literature should stand by itself, of itself, and for itself.
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Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
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I live to the rhythm of my country and I cannot remain on the sidelines. I want to be here. I want to be part of it. I want to be a witness. I want to walk arm in arm with it. I want to hear it more and more, to cradle it, to carry it like a medal on my chest. Activism is a constant element in my life, even though afterwards I anguish over not having written 'my own things.' Testimonial literature provides evidence of events that people would like to hide, denounces and therefore is political and part of a country in which everything remains to be done and documented.
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Nothing is harmful to literature except censorship, and that almost never stops literature going where it wants to go either, because literature has a way of surpassing everything that blocks it and growing stronger for the exercise.
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Vain man is apt to think we were merely intended for the world's propagation and to keep its human inhabitants sweet and clean; but, by their leaves, had we the same literature he would find our brains as fruitful as our bodies.
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Literature is always what the dominant ideology recognizes as literature.
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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.
