Literature Quotes
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I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offense. ... Everyone who contributes to the 'too much' of literature is doing grave social injury.
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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.
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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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The principle of literature is devotion to the particulars of life.
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An exile's only country is his country's literature.
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Imagine that for hundreds of years your most formative traumas, your daily suffering and pain, the abuse you live through, the terror you live with, are unspeakable - not the basis of literature. You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs.... You learn how to leave your body and create someone else who takes over when you cannot stand it any more. You develop a self who is ingratiating and obsequious and imitative and aggressively passive and silent - you learn, in a word, femininity.
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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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I am certain that there are two things in life which are dependable - the delights of the flesh and the delights of literature. I have had the good fortune to bring them together and enjoy them together in full quantity.
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The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.
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I never, as a reader, have been particularly interested in dystopian literature or science fiction or, in fact, fantasy.
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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.
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Thai society rarely attempts to control literature in the same way that it vigilantly polices visual art. It's ironic because people in this society are more aware of literature than they are of art.
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Literature is the thought of thinking souls.
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I made a compact with myself that in my person literature should stand by itself, of itself, and for itself.
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To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.
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Literature sustains life because it captures death in its forward march. Clickety-clickety-clack, the wheels go round and round ...
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The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the one American writer whom the English whole-heartedly admire is Walt Whitman. There, you will hear them say, is the real American undisguised. In the whole of English literature there is no figure which resembles his - among all our poetry none in the least comparable to Leaves of Grass
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Through engagement with others, literature lets us imagine what it would be like to be differe.
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There isn't a lot of poverty literature in the young-adult world. And I don't know why that is, but I think certainly I felt a gap.
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There are a handful of people whom money won't spoil, and we all count ourselves among them.
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Literature is my life of course, but from an ontological point of view. From an existential point of view, I like being a teacher.
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Russian literature got me interested in what literature means.
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The shortest answer is doing the thing.
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Oratory is, after all, the prose literature of the savage.
