Quotes About Literature

Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.

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.

We're at an interesting phase of Asian and Asian-American writing, where we might succeed in having readers look at us as creative individuals who write with fury and fire about the world, and in new ways, without having them say things like "I read a really good Indian book," or "That Malaysian fellow writes very well." So I hope by identifying as Indian I can get people who don't usually read "ethnic" or "Indian" literature to read that literature and enjoy it.

In my first class at the University of Kentucky, my American Literature professor came in, and the first sentence out of his mouth was "The central theme of American Literature is an attempt to reconcile what we've done to the New World." wrote that down in my notebook, and thought, "What is he talking about?" But that's what I think about now. The New World and what we've done to it.

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.

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.

[Bob Dylan] is principally a recording artist, and if he weren't, it is unthinkable he would have had such an impact. He is to be heard first and read second. Well, what about plays, you could reasonably ask. Is [William] Shakespeare not great literature? Yes, obviously: but his work is great literature even to those who have never known it performed. The same is evidently not true of Dylan.

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.

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.

What we lack is a basic willingness to see literature as providing some kind of necessary foundation. Our society still expects schools to prepare their charges for work only and not for life. As such, literature is construed as at best technically useless and random, at worst socially disruptive.

I believe that prizes are useful things for the disciplines, whether we are talking about chemistry or we're talking... It motivates, it, you know, inspires, it encourages and it brings, in the case of literature, it brings literature, the arts out of the ghetto.

I think about Chilean literature as a family, because I grew up reading the literature of my country. I feel like I have fathers and stepfathers and a lot of brothers and sisters and distant cousins and all that.

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.

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.

In my case, literature is a kind of revenge. It's something that gives me what real life can't give me - all the adventures, all the suffering. All the experiences I can only live in the imagination, literature completes.

I wasn't reading it [the Bible] as literature. I was reading it as literature, and as history, and as a moral guide, and as anthropology and law and culture.

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.

I like books. I've always got a literature book going. I'd be in there reading, in my off time.

America is the only nation in the world that is founded on creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature.

One of our problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit. We re interested in the news of the day and the problems of the hour.

Actually, I'm frequently described as the UK's only translator of Korean literature, but even that isn't accurate - Agnita Tennant is UK-based, Janet Poole is British though lives in Toronto, Brother Anthony was born here though is now a naturalised Korean citizen. There's also Chi-young Kim and Sora Kim-Russell, who are younger and do fiction for commercial houses.

So our student will flit like a busy bee through the entire garden of literature, light on every blossom, collect a little nectar from each, and carry it to his hive.

One man finds in religion his literature and his science, another finds in it his joy and his duty.

Kids' literature now is dystopian, you know.

Literature was intended to be dangerous. Art was meant to be dangerous. Ideas were nothing if they were not dangerous.

There is no such thing as children’s literature.

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.

The switch that I'd like to throw on is the one that says, "Look, you're a human being whose mind is every bit as active as anybody else's. Your experiences are just as real." For that matter, even if they're even if they're crazy, they're valid. They occurred in this world so they're valid topics for literature.

When you read the psychedelic literature, there is a distinction between the so-called natural psychedelics and synthetic psychedelics that are artificially produced.

A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance.

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

We have always created - music, literature, art, dance. The art around us - or lack of it - may be a measure of how we're doing as individuals and as a civilization, so maybe we should be worried.

The sensuality, delicacy of literature does not exist for me; only the passion, energy and struggle… Most of my friends deplore this: they are always telling me what I should leave out in order to have success. But I know that nothing has more success in the end than an intelligent ferocity.

Some people have argued that listening to a work of literature does not really promote literacy in the same way that reading does. Having tried this for several months, however, I can report from the trenches that, for me, immersive listening is as intellectually challenging, stimulating, and rewarding as immersive reading.

The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.

The close-up has no equivalent in a narrative fashioned of words. Literature is totally lacking in any working method to enable it to isolate a single vastly enlarged detail in which one face comes forward to underline a state of mind or stress the importance of a single detail in comparison with the rest. As a narrative device, the ability to vary the distance between the camera and the object may be a small thing indeed, but it makes for a notable difference between cinema and oral or written narrative, in which the distance between language and image is always the same.

I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.

There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality.

To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.

Janet Mock's honest and sometimes searing journey is a rare and important look into la vida liminal, one that she manages to negotiate remarkably well, with grace, humor, and fierce grit. Mock doesn't only redefine what realness means to her, but challenges us to rethink our own perceptions of gender and sexuality, feminism and sisterhood, making this book a transcendent piece of American literature.

What is very troubling is that people who have tried to write literature, even, for example, proletarian writers, seem to write within the norms of the dominant class.

Héctor Tobar's accomplished first novel affords a perspective that is overdue and urgently needed in North American literature- -an insider's vision of L.A. as a Third World city. The Tattooed Soldier is a riveting book that manages to be at once politically informed and at the same time a psychologically astute study of that most elemental of stories: revenge.

That is exactly the writer's problem. What does literature stand for in a hungry world?

I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things

Many a woman shudders... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians.

Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world

All literature, is, finally autobiographical.