Literature Quotes
-
Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.
-
Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.
-
When I was a worker I busied myself with socialist or, if you like, marxist literature.
-
There are no new facts about the Kennedys, only new attitudes, a literature that, like the automobile industry, puts new bodies on old chassis.
-
The forward march of American literature is usually chronicled by way of its male novelists. There is little sense, in that version of the story, that women writers of those eras were doing much worth remembering.
-
Literature is my life of course, but from an ontological point of view. From an existential point of view, I like being a teacher.
-
The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever 'solve'. Whether my answers are any good or not, they represent a fair amount of thinking about the questions.
-
The power of literature does not lie in resonance with the particular but the way that the particular speaks to a broader, more universal truth.
-
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.
-
Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report.
-
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.
-
I made a compact with myself that in my person literature should stand by itself, of itself, and for itself.
-
Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.
-
I am actuated by an ambition which I believe to be an honourable one the ambition of serving the great cause of truth, while endeavouring to forward the literature of the country.
-
To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.
-
Literature sustains life because it captures death in its forward march. Clickety-clickety-clack, the wheels go round and round ...
-
Anglo-Saxons created a vernacular literature to which the continental nations at that time could show no parallel.
-
At bottom, textual criticism for virtually all other ancient literature relies on creative conjectures, or imaginative guesses, at reconstructing the wording of the original. Not so with the New Testament.
-
The idea of bringing young people up to Literature is doubtless calculated to raise the eyebrows almost as much as the suggestion of bringing them up to the Stage.
-
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.
-
In the most absolute tranquility or in the midst of tumultuous events, in safety or danger, in innocence or corruption, we are a crowd of others. And this crowd is certainly a blessing for literature.
