Literature Quotes
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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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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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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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Literature is the thought of thinking souls.
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There are reviews that are clearly wrong. Dr. Johnson's famous Life of Savage, he's clearly wrong about the value of Savage. But it's one of the great works in English literature. You can learn more about the artistic expression and what the poet does and how to write about art from that than any number of guys who are terrible writers, who have no original ideas, but who say yes, "Hamlet" is a wonderful play. It's a meaningless statement.
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Postmodernism cost literature its audience.
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The shortest answer is doing the thing.
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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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The hard-drinking newspaperman is, or used to be, a stock character of fiction. Now he is being phased out of literature just as he is being phased out of life.
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Now, I can smile at the stock quality of these friends, these uniforms, these looking-glasses, these sharers. Each is a character lifted straight from literature and yet, life successfully aping art, they are alive, and fulfil their destinies - or act their parts - flawlessly.
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I'm kind of hooked to the game of art and literature; my heroes are artists and writers.
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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.
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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.
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Literature is a form of language that breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of a language which has no other law than that of affirming in opposition to all other forms of discourse its own precipitous existence.
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I never liked to hunt, you know. There was always the danger of having a horse fall on you.
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The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.
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My mother's influence in molding my character was conspicuous. She forced me to learn daily long chapters of the Bible by heart. To that discipline and patient, accurate resolve I owe not only much of my general power of taking pains, but of the best part of my taste for literature.
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Increasingly, those who used to teach and write critical or theoretical texts are writing fiction, poetry and so on; and kinds of texts are being produced that call for budding readers rather different from those who studied literature in the past.
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My works are Chinese literature, which is part of world literature. They show the life of Chinese people as well as the country's unique culture and folk customs.
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An exile's only country is his country's literature.
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All I try to do is portray Indians as we are, in creative ways. With imagination and poetry. I think a lot of Native American literature is stuck in one idea: sort of spiritual, environmentalist Indians. And I want to portray everyday lives. I think by doing that, by portraying the ordinary lives of Indians, perhaps people learn something new.
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He who keeps his cool best wins.
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Literature, taken in all its bearings, forms the grand line of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms.
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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.
