Literature Quotes
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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.
Michelle Dean
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There are a handful of people whom money won't spoil, and we all count ourselves among them.
Mignon McLaughlin
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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.
William T. Vollmann
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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.
Ernest Hemingway
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There are no new facts about the Kennedys, only new attitudes, a literature that, like the automobile industry, puts new bodies on old chassis.
John Gregory Dunne
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I did not discover literature of any kind until I was about eleven, or ten.
Ben Peek
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Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.
Ernest Hemingway
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To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.
Ernst Otto Fischer
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I never, as a reader, have been particularly interested in dystopian literature or science fiction or, in fact, fantasy.
Lois Lowry
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I made a compact with myself that in my person literature should stand by itself, of itself, and for itself.
Charles Dickens
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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.
Northrop Frye
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Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibits with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like a cat-show, but the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell.
Northrop Frye
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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.
George R. R. Martin
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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.
Edgar Allan Poe
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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.
William James
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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.
Bent Larsen
