Literature Quotes
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Bad literature is a form of treason.
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The heart is a small thing, but desireth great matters. It is not sufficient for a kite's dinner, yet the whole world is not sufficient for it.
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It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.
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No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself
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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.
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All of my education at Harvard, then Oxford, then Paris was in literature - even my thesis was on Shakespeare.
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The problem with literature, with writing, is that it works sometimes in terms of correction of social ills. Other times, it just does not suffice. The proof of that is the ability of a dictator to snuff out the life of a writer.
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Few nations match our rich resource of literature.
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Before college, I hadn't voluntarily read anything that might be called literature; I didn't think I'd understand it; I never seemed to understand my English teacher's interpretations of what we read.
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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.
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I don't really need to be inspired by literature though. At the end of the day it's colour and imagery moved around until it works.
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Russian literature got me interested in what literature means.
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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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The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.
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Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.
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I think my books give people a language to have a conversation about God that's not religious. There isn't enough new literature that brings the conversation of God into a modern context. I love the Bible, but in the West we've analyzed it until it fits into a structure of control. We need more new stories. We need different ways of looking at things, and I think it's coming.
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In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.
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We didn't have a television, so I grew up with books. This isn't to suggest I'm an intellectual, but I do read a lot because part of acting is an exploration of literature.
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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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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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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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There is something very romantic about the orphan figure in American literature.
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No medium is more limited than any other. It's what a person does with it. We could talk about the differences between music and literature and photography, sure, but it really comes down to what a person does.
