Literature Quotes
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There is a cheap literature that speaks to us of the need of escape. It is true that when we travel we are in search of distance. But distance is not to be found. It melts away. And escape has never led anywhere. The moment a man finds that he must play the races, go the Arctic, or make war in order to feel himself alive, that man has begin to spin the strands that bind him to other men and to the world. But what wretched strands! A civilization that is really strong fills man to the brim, though he never stir. What are we worth when motionless, is the question.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.
Northrop Frye
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This is a great mind at work examining itself. This is where literature comes from.
Katharine Weber
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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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He who keeps his cool best wins.
Norman Cousins
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Literature, taken in all its bearings, forms the grand line of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms.
William Godwin
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I don't see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our society.
Northrop Frye
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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.
George Eliot
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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.
Sherman Alexie
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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.
Michel Foucault
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Habit is a second nature, or rather, it is 'ten times nature'.
William James
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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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Art should walk a tightrope. That's what art should be. Art should be dangerous. You can't be scared to say something with it. People love to talk about how comics are real art and real literature, so why not use these characters to talk about real things, even if it is dangerous?
Jeff Lemire
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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.
Wole Soyinka
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Just as the office worker dreams of murdering his hated boss and so is saved from really murdering him, so it is with the author; with his great dreams he helps his readers to survive, to avoid their worst intentions. And society, without realizing it respects and even exalts him, albeit with a kind of jealousy, fear and even repulsion, since few people want to discover the horrors that lurk in the depths of their souls. This is the highest mission of great literature, and there is no other.
Ernesto Sabato
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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.
Nicholas Royle
