Quotes About Literature

Most British playwrights of my generation, as well as younger folks, apparently feel somewhat obliged to Russian literature - and not only those writing for theatres. Russian literature is part of the basic background knowledge for any writer. So there is nothing exceptional in the interest I had towards Russian literature and theatre. Frankly, I couldn't image what a culture would be like without sympathy towards Russian literature and Russia, whether we'd be talking about drama or Djagilev.

We do literature a real disservice if we reduce it to knowledge or to use, to a problem to be solved. If literature solves problems, it does so by its own inexhaustibility, and by its ultimate refusal to be applied or used, even for moral good. This refusal, indeed, is literature's most moral act. At a time when meanings are manifold, disparate, and always changing, the rich possibility of interpretation--the happy resistance of the text to ever be fully known and mastered--is one of the most exhilarating products of human culture.

I have nothing but great respect for great scholars. But I was in grad school in the '80s and '90s, at the height of the theory craziness. It had a big part in why I ended up becoming a writer rather than a scholar, because I thought, "I just can't play these games." I was interested in literature because I loved literature, and so much of the theoretical positioning, at that moment 25 years ago, was antagonistic to literature. You know, trying to show that Jane Austen is a terrible person because she wasn't thinking about colonialism.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

The point about sales is relevant because it suggests there are cultures out there that are supporting and consuming, on a vast scale, challenging works of literature. Works of literature that in the United States would sell only a few thousand copies, if they managed to find a publisher at all. The success of these texts in Spain or Italy or wherever contributes to a kind of national conversation that we're perhaps not having here in the U.S.

The Constitution is more than literature, but as literature, it is primarily a work of the imagination. It imagined a country: fantastic. More fantastic still, it imagined a country full of people imagining themselves.

I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time - and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come.

Books, we are told, propose to instruct or to amuse. Indeed! A true antithesis to knowledge, in this case, is not pleasure, but power. All that is literature seeks to communicate power; all that is not literature, to communicate knowledge.

The 20th century saw far greater catastrophes than September 11th, as bad as it was, and they didn't render literature or art or music irrelevant. In fact, I think that literature and art help us to understand - sometimes they provide narratives and metaphors for understanding history, for understanding recent catastrophes.

When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign - a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don't want to hear the word mentioned.

I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else.

There is first the literature of knowledge, and secondly, the literature of power. The function of the first is--to teach; the function of the second is--to move, the first is a rudder, the second an oar or a sail. The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding; the second speaks ultimately, it may happen, to the higher understanding or reason, but always through affections of pleasure and sympathy.

Hindu religious literature, indeed all religious literature, is full of illustrations to prove the truth.

Korean feminism is on the brink of death. Korea has a less clear boundary between popular literature and serious literature than in other countries. I feel that feminism is abandoned like a product that was a craze in the past.

In general, in America, every discourse in literature in 15 minutes degenerates into a conversation about ethics, morality and this and that. The Holocaust and the consequences of it. Well, I find it terribly boring, predictable and unimportant, because what matters about literature is esthetic achievement.

Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature.

I think any good literature, whether it's for children or for adults, will appeal to everybody. As far as children's literature goes, adults should be able to read it and enjoy it as much as a child would.

When journalism is silenced, literature must speak. Because while journalism speaks with facts, literature speaks with truth.

If you read the literature of Soviet Communism, you see a dogma that's chilling. On the other hand, if you read the literature of anti-communism, it's every bit as dogmatic.

You once said to me that I talk like a man in a book. I not only talk, but think and feel like one. I have spent my life in books; literature has deeply dyed my brain its own colour. This literary colouring is a protective one--like the brown of the rabbit or the checks of the quail--making it impossible for me to tell where literature ends and I begin.

The book it reminded me of most is Henry Miller’s The Books in My Life. Like Miller, Shields manages to convey his affection for and admiration of literature, and that, the enthusiasm and admiration, can revitalize the reader’s love for the art form. I’m grateful for How Literature Saved My Life because the book has made me think again – and for the first time in a while – 'Well, what is it we do when we read?' It’s a damned annoying question, but it needs to be asked now and then, and Shields has asked it in a way I find resonant and moving.

When I was in high school I found literature and history interesting, but science not at all. Literature and history obviously involved thinking, but science seemed to be all about memorizing facts and doing mindless calculations.

The market literature, which was particularly strong in Igboland, in Onitsha, today it is no longer strong. It is one of the victims of the civil war, that market was actually destroyed and at the end of the war a new Nigeria has struggled to come into being and I believe that what is probably going to replace the market literature might be the video, which they have taken to in a big way, creating dramas. So that may be the next thing way we will see coming out of the local basic level in our society.

Some years ago John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in an essay on his efforts at writing a history of economics: 'As one approaches the present, one is filled with a sense of hopelessness; in a year and possibly even a month, there is now more economic comment in the supposedly serious literature than survives from the whole of the thousand years commonly denominated as the Middle Ages ... anyone who claims to be familiar with it all is a confessing liar.' I believe that all physicists would subscribe to the same sentiments regarding their own professional literature. I do at any rate.

New media may at first appear as mere codes of transmission for older achievement and established patterns of thought. But nobody could make the mistake of supposing that phonetic writing merely made it possible for the Greeks to set down in visual order what they had though and known before writing. In the same way printing made literature possible. It did not merely encode literature.

Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.

Religion is only literature, but luckily literature is not only religion.

All literature, all philosophical treatises, all the voices of antiquity are full of examples for imitation, which would all lie unseen in darkness without the light of literature.

The love of writing comes at a very early age. For me, for instance, comic books so affected me. And a lot of people who come up to me and start talking about writing, when I start talking to them about the "Fantastic Four," they look at me aghast. They say, "'The Fantastic Four?' That's not literature." I say, "Yeah, but it was when I was 11 years old." This was literature.

Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

I didn't choose literature. Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side.

Literature is breathing. I teach literature the way someone else might teach First Aid.

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

Food-addiction, or food-drunkenness, is an old story in Hygienic literature. This is the first mention I have seen of it in "regular" medical literature. I fear to hope that its recognition spells progress.

For me, literature is the daughter of music: a bit heavy and more level headed than its mother. Literature submits to the same principles of successive perception, which allows it to build progressively.

I got to college in '99, and I went to study literature and writing, and so within a couple years we had Bush elected, 9/11, we were at war, so I was sort of having my political and spiritual awakening at the same time I was becoming an adult, and that's a lot of stuff at once. I became very focused on the state of the world, and I started studying that stuff more, and I just had a real identity crisis. I couldn't even really just study literature.

The Bible towers in content above all earlier religious literature; and it towers just as impressively over all subsequent literature in the direct simplicity of its message and...its appeal to men of all lands and times.

I was guilty of judging capitalism by its operations and socialism by its hopes and aspirations; capitalism by its works and socialism by its literature.

Comics? Honestly, that's more a matter of nostalgia for me. I think most of that energy has gone to my love of literature, and my love of film...

There are lots of unlikable characters in literature. It doesn't mean they're not fascinating.

Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?

There is nothing like literature: I lose a cow, I write about her death, and my writing pays me enough to buy another cow.

English literature is a flying fish.

I hated myself and the world because I had failed to face and accept the limitations of my self and of life. In literature this refusal is called romanticism; in psychology, neurosis.

We could say that Romanian Onirisme was born from painting and not from surrealist literature. The visual is primordial. Dimov said, 'Dreams are not a source, but a canon, a legislative model.'

A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.

Hulga the whole while hollering like a half-slaughtered hog. (Attention, students of literature! Alliteration - have you noticed? - is my least vice.)

I am not sure, once a poet has found out what has been written already, and how it was written - once, in short, he has learnt his trade - that he should bother with literature at all. Poetry is not like surgery, a technique that can be copied. Every operation the poet performs is unique, and need never be done again.