Literature Quotes
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Perhaps the most surprising thing about mathematics is that it is so surprising. The rules which we make up at the beginning seem ordinary and inevitable, but it is impossible to foresee their consequences. These have only been found out by long study, extending over many centuries. Much of our knowledge is due to a comparatively few great mathematicians such as Newton, Euler, Gauss, or Riemann; few careers can have been more satisfying than theirs. They have contributed something to human thought even more lasting than great literature, since it is independent of language.
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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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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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In communist Russia, their major organ was Pravda, which means "truth." The Russians knew how to read between the lines. They didn't take their literature literally.
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I don't see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our society.
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We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.
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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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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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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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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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Before acting, I was always attracted to words, to literature - be they the words of Williams, Arthur Miller, Shakespeare or Moliere.
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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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We didn't have a television, so I grew up with books. This isn't to suggest I'm an intellectual, but I do read a lot because part of acting is an exploration of literature.
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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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All of my education at Harvard, then Oxford, then Paris was in literature - even my thesis was on Shakespeare.
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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.
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An essay is a work of literary art which has a minimum of one anecdote and one universal idea.
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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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Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair.
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Let's put it this way. I question whether 6 million Jews actually died in Nazi death camps. There are two major sources for Holocaust stories. One is the Nuremburg war-crimes trial, which has been shown by all honest historians to be a farce of justice. Another source is the great body of literature and media work, and at least 90% of that material is from biased Jewish sources.
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The distinction between literary and genre fiction is stupid and pernicious. It dates back to a feud between Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James. James won, and it split literature into two streams. But it's a totally false dichotomy.
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Absurdly improbable things are quite as liable to happen in real life as in weak literature.
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No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself
