Literature Quotes
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Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.
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The secret of literature, which conventional people don't guess, is that writers are forever looking for the surprising revelation - not for reinforcement of collective wisdom.
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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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I have respect for literature. If he found the words, if she found the words - this is a book!
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The general history of art and literature shows that the highest achievements of the human mind are, as a rule, not favourably received at first.
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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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I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory than a success with some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree.
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Postmodernism cost literature its audience.
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Christian literature makes reference to many episodes that parallel the experiences of those going a yogic way. Saint Anthony, one of the first desert mystics, frequently encountered strange and sometimes terrifying psychophysical forces while at prayer.
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It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.
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People didn't vote for me because they thought I was a racist and if you look at my campaign literature it is not much different than a lot of Republican literature and some conservative Democrats in the South.
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For those of us who take literature very seriously, picking up a work of fiction is the start of an adventure comparable in anticipatory excitement to what I imagine is felt by an athlete warming up for a competition, a mountain climber preparing for the ascent: it is the beginning of a process whose outcome is unknown, one that promises the thrill and elation of success but may as easily end in bitter disappointment. Committed readers realize at a certain point that literature is where we have learned a good part of the little we know about living.
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Art should walk a tightrope. That's what art should be. Art should be dangerous. You can't be scared to say something with it. People love to talk about how comics are real art and real literature, so why not use these characters to talk about real things, even if it is dangerous?
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What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?
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I studied Comparative Literature at Cornell. Structuralism was real big then. The idea of reading and writing as being this language game. There's a lot of appeal to that. It's nice to think of it as this playful kind of thing. But I think that another way to look at it is "Look, I just want to be sincere. I want to write something and make you feel something and maybe you will go out and do something." And it seems that the world is in such bad shape now that we don't have time to do nothing but language games. That's how it seems to me.
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Nonfiction writers are second-class citizens, the Ellis Island of literature. We just can't quite get in. And yes, it pisses me off.
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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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Dostoyevsky wrote of the unconscious as if it were conscious; that is in reality the reason why his characters seem 'pathological', while they are only visualized more clearly than any other figures in imaginative literature... He was in the rank in which we set Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe.
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Absurdly improbable things are quite as liable to happen in real life as in weak literature.
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Anglo-Saxons created a vernacular literature to which the continental nations at that time could show no parallel.
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There are significant moments in everyone's day that can make literature. That's what you ought to write about.
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Russian literature got me interested in what literature means.
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Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
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What is very troubling is that people who have tried to write literature, even, for example, proletarian writers, seem to write within the norms of the dominant class.
