Quotes About Literature

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

What a lost person needs is a map of the territory, with his own position marked on it so he can see where he is in relation to everything else. Literature is not only a mirror; it is also a map, a geography of the mind. Our literature is one such map, if we can learn to read it as our literature, as the product of who and where we have been. We need such a map desperately, we need to know about here, because here is where we live. For the members of a country or a culture, shared knowledge of their place, their here, is not a luxury but a necessity. Without that knowledge we will not survive.

All great popular literature today one day will be seen as great literature and will no longer be seen as popular literature.

I am fine with my books being categorized as African-American literature but I hope they are also considered Haitian-American literature and American literature. All of these things are part of who I am and what I write.

The amplification of our diverse literary voices is a political act of resistance. Our lives are important, too. Our lives should be represented in our literature. And that literature is vital, compelling, and accessible. That literature deserves to be disseminated and noticed and available. And with respect to the dissemination and promotion of diverse voices - librarians, educators, and editors of literary journals play such an important role. They deserve not only a hearty shout out, but also our thanks and support.

I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much.

Modern Arabic literature achieved international recognition when Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel prize in 1988 (.....) Mahfouz also rendered Arabic literature a great service by developing, over the years, a form of language in which many of the archaisms and cliches that had become fashionable were discarded, a language that could serve as an adequate instrument for the writing of fiction in these times.

For those of us who take literature very seriously, picking up a work of fiction is the start of an adventure comparable in anticipatory excitement to what I imagine is felt by an athlete warming up for a competition, a mountain climber preparing for the ascent: it is the beginning of a process whose outcome is unknown, one that promises the thrill and elation of success but may as easily end in bitter disappointment. Committed readers realize at a certain point that literature is where we have learned a good part of the little we know about living.

This act of empathy, that women go through from the time we're little girls - we read all of literature, all of history, it's really about boys, most of it. But I can feel more like Peter Pan than Tinker Bell, or like Wendy. I wanted to be Tom Sawyer, not Becky. And we're so used to that act of empathizing with the protagonist of a male-driven plot. I mean, that's what we've done all our lives. You read history, you read great literature, Shakespeare, it's all fellas, you know?

We spend so much time, these days, on forms of literature that don't rise to be literature, and I'm speaking about Twitter posts and quick and hot takes on different websites. We sort of zoom from thing to thing like a hummingbird.

Literature makes history come to life. It is maybe the most accurate depiction of history, especially literature that was written in the time period depicted in the story.

Literature, at least good literature, is science tempered with the blood of art. Like architecture or music.

Very often I hear talk about female literature, or femininity in literature. It's a categorization I am not sure about. Maybe there are a few elements that distinguish women's observations from men's, like the ability to notice some fine details.

I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature.

Actor training should be broadly humanistic, involving the study not just of dramatic literature and theatre history, but of languages, literature, and history generally, and should be centered on acting in plays rather than just exercises, improvisations, monologues, or even scenes.

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

Literature exists inside the language. It's made of words. It's not made of ideas and it's not made of concepts, of psychological analysis. It's made of words. In the same way in which music is made of notes and a painting is made of lines of colors, the matter of literature are words.

If I could change the attitude of young men toward literature, I would want them to read not just for escape, but because literature can be more truthful about things like sex, commitment, and aging. It can be more truthful about the stuff that our parents lied to us (and themselves) about, and the stuff that everyone has to lie about. It can all be dealt with truthfully in fiction and poetry.

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.

Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.

I hate everything that does not relate to literature, conversations bore me (even if they relate to literature), to visit people bores me, the sorrows and joys of my relatives bore me to the very soul. Conversation takes the importance, the seriousness, the truth, out of everything I think.

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.

I do lots of reading and speaking at many universities about literature and also about politics, which is as much a part of my life as the literature.

I had an older brother who was very interested in literature, so I had an early exposure to literature, and and theater. My father sometimes would work in musical comedies.

It is untrue that fiction is nonutilitarian. The uses of fiction are synonymous with the uses of literature. They include refreshment, clarification of life, self-awareness, expansion of our range of experiences, and enlargement of our sense of understanding and discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty , and understanding. Like literature generally, fiction is a form of discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty, and understanding. If it is all these things, the question of whether it is a legitimate use of time should not even arise.

The vast majority of us imagine ourselves as like literature people or math people. But the truth is that the massive processor known as the human brain is neither a literature organ or a math organ. It is both and more.

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

Literature incarnates its meanings as concretely as possible. The knowledge that literature gives of a subject is the kind of knowledge that is obtained by (vicariously) living through an experience.

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

I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.

Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.

Animation wasn't my love, but drawing was. I loved drawing, and when it came time to graduate from high school, I looked around and it was like, "Wow, I don't really want to study math. I don't really want to study science. I don't really want to study literature. Is there a place where I can go and draw cartoons?"

The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.

I didn't know that Mahler would come to play so large a role, nor that music and literature and philosophy can interinanimate one another in the way I've come to think they do in this case.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us.

English literature is a flying fish.

He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.

We must strike down the insidious lie that a book is the creation of an individual soul labouring in isolation. We must strike it down because it threatens the overall quality and breadth of American literature.

A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature.

I could not live by literature if only to begin with, because of the slow maturing of my work and its special character.

I'm often drawn to darker subjects. There's a lot of awful stuff in literature - and in life. Every day I read the paper and think how much I'd love certain people to just go away. But the flipside is that much of life is really good and sweet and tender and true. That's another thing pets teach us. That, and the importance of holding on to those good things in life.

Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind...The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.

When literature becomes overly erudite, it means that interest in the art has gone and curiosity about the artist is what's important. It becomes a kind of idolatry.

The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.

I want to go to college for literature. I want to be a writer. I mean, I love what I do, but its not all I want to do-be a professional liar for the rest of my life.

this is the weakness of most 'edifying' or 'propaganda' literature. There is no diversity...You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also.

The traditional Sanskrit learning has given to Brahaman community of Kashmir, small as it has been always, a distinguished place in the history of Sanskrit literature since early times.