Literature Quotes
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If one has not read the newspapers for some months and then reads them all together, one sees, as one never saw before, how much time is wasted with this kind of literature.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Jerome never liked me - preferred my sister who was a little fool excited by modern literature - all swear-words and scatology - before it became fashionable.
Peter Greenaway
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Of course I've enjoyed having the Nobel Prize, the prestige that goes along with it, the money that came with it in particular. I was the typical, still am to some extent, impecunious writer, just struggling to make ends meet, so that, nobody's going to deny that at all. In fact, if they want to give it to me a second time, I'm standing by, ready to receive it, but it's a problem, it's a real problem and then expectations and then you have monsters like Sani Abacha who come up from time to time and who would have died a happy man if he'd succeeded in hanging a Nobel Laureate for literature.
Wole Soyinka
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The Da Vinci Code may well be the only novel ever written that begins with the word 'renowned'... I think what enabled the first word to tip me off that I was about to spend a number of hours in the company of one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature was this. Putting curriculum vitae details into complex modifiers on proper names or definite descriptions is what you do in journalistic stories about deaths; you just don't do it in describing an event in a narrative... Why did I keep reading? Because London Heathrow is a long way from San Francisco International.
Geoffrey K. Pullum
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Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution," the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.
Thomas Sowell
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Book critics certainly are judges who wield a tremendous amount of power in terms of whether or not a book will reach a wider audience. That's one of the reasons why I try to give coverage to books written by Latinx writers; too many worthwhile works of literature do not get the kind of coverage they deserve, and I've certainly seen that with respect to books written by writers of color. But there are some wonderful, diverse writers out there who mentor and otherwise support those voices that often have been ignored by much of the mainstream press.
Daniel Olivas
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There is nothing sacred or untouchable except the freedom to think. Without criticism, that is to say, without rigor and experimentation, there is no science, without criticism there is no art or literature. I would also say that without criticism there is no healthy society.
Octavio Paz
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The same is true of ranking him thus against any work of literature. [Bob Dylan] has been made, through no fault of his own, the object of odious tokenism.
David Bennun
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Writers throughout the ages have one weapon, which is literature, but they also have their responsibilities as a citizen when literature does not seem to suffice. I mean, they are not mutually exclusive. One continues to write anyway but if you are called out to demonstrate, if people are being killed in the streets, it's hardly the moment to go for your pen and paper, you know, help in one way or the other.
Wole Soyinka
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Unpredictable action is movement's equivalent to a page-turner in literature. On stage, we have certain options to make our moves appear surprising or even shocking. One choice is to remove transitions. We try to construct motion hunks, hunks of action that could be missed if an audience member blinks.
Elizabeth Streb
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I'm not sure many writers are trying to reconcile all the things that are separated in our culture - body and mind, urban and pastoral, lyricism and hardboiled, men and women, joy and grief. I tried to do quite a lot, but I wanted to create a serious work of literature.
Nicola Griffith
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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.
Edwin Muir
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What fascinated me mostly about Mickey Cohen was that he, in his later years, hired someone to help him to comprehend literature, to help him to read better, to understand words better.
Harvey Keitel
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A precious, mouldering pleasure 't is To meet an antique book In just the dress his century wore; A privilege, I think, His venerable hand to take, And warming in our own, A passage back, or two, to make To times when he was young. His quaint opinions to inspect, His knowledge to unfold On what concerns our mutual mind, The literature of old.
Emily Dickinson
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I think about all the people who have created something that lives after them - works of art, plays, music, films, literature, poetry that will be read, seen, performed, and heard for the rest of time. If I could do something that lives after me, then I think I will have had a life well led.
Seamus Dever
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Literature is always what the dominant ideology recognizes as literature.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Literature invents its own rules.
Joseph Brodsky
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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.
Rita Dove
