Quotes About Literature

It seems to me that literature is giving way a little bit to the immediacy of other diversions, other forms of entertainment. What will it be in fifty years? I don't know. Will there be printed books? Probably, but I'm not sure. There's always going to be literature, though. I believe that. I think literature has a way of getting deep into people and being essential. Literature has its own powers.

Nothing is harmful to literature except censorship, and that almost never stops literature going where it wants to go either, because literature has a way of surpassing everything that blocks it and growing stronger for the exercise.

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.

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.

The greatness of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.

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.

Thai society rarely attempts to control literature in the same way that it vigilantly polices visual art. It's ironic because people in this society are more aware of literature than they are of art.

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

I refuse to see literature as amusement, as a game. I think that you ought not to approach literature without a moral responsibility for every word you write.

If you focus on literature through only one small element of it, like the more scientific element of linguistics, then where is the joy that brought us literature in the first place, which is to have a story?

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.

In America there is really very little knowledge of the literature of the rest of the world. Of the literature of Latin America, yes, But that's not all that different in inspiration from that of America, or of Europe. One must go further. You don't even have to go too far in terms of geography - you can start with the Native Americans and listen to their poetry.

I think fantasy literature is the one true literature of hope and imagination.

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

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.

My life has had a lot of fits and starts: before I studied literature at all I was a musician, and began undergrad as a conservatory student. I started studying literature in my third year of college, when I took a poetry course with James Longenbach that was pretty extraordinary. It changed my life.

Language and, presumably, literature are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature toward the state is essentially the reaction of the permanent-better yet, the infinite-against the temporary, against the finite.

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.

If you can imagine the story of the world as a giant movie, to not have some understanding of the Bible - its story, its history, and its impact - would be like watching a great movie and removing part of the plot. It can't be done. The real truth is that everyone regardless of faith tradition benefits from knowing and understanding these aspects of the Bible. It enhances one's knowledge of literature, science, art etc. It's difficult to read any classic work of literature for instance and not see biblical allusions.

Literature often gets taught nowadays as a record of the sins and shortcomings of the past. I see literature and the arts very differently: as essential to being human and to human progress, individual and collective.

Literature professes to be important while at the same time considering itself an object of doubt. It confirms itself as it disparages itself. It seeks itself: this is more than it has a right to do, because literature may be one of those things which deserve to be found but not to be sought.

Literature is about telling stories. Now, the gift of literature is that, in some lucky cases, reading a novel or a story makes the reader more curious, more open-minded. It may open a third eye in the middle of the reader's forehead.

Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.

If nobody talks about books, if they are not discussed or somehow contended with, literature ceases to be a conversation, ceases to be dynamic. Most of all, it ceases to be intimate. It degenerates into a monologue or a mutter. An unreviewed book is a struck bell that gives no resonance. Without reviews, literature would be oddly mute in spite of all those words on all those pages of all those books. Reviewing makes of reading a participant sport, not a spectator sport.

The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it....we see literature best from the midst of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a high religion. The field cannot be well seen from within the field.

Science is a capital or fund perpetually reinvested; it accumulates, rolls up, is carried forward by every new man. Every man of science has all the science before him to go upon, to set himself up in business with. What an enormous sum Darwin availed himself of and reinvested! Not so in literature; to every poet, to every artist, it is still the first day of creation, so far as the essentials of his task are concerned. Literature is not so much a fund to be reinvested as it is a crop to be ever new-grown.

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.

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

As I grew up, I was interested in other areas, too, especially literature. It became a major love of mine. Later, it became a difficult choice for me as to whether to major in music or literature. It wasn't until my 30s that I began a profession in music.

Just so long as all our literature is pervaded with the thought that women are inferior, so long will our sex be held in a low estimate.

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.

I remember my emotions the day we watched Nelson Mandela walk out of prison Writing & literature in South Africa during the anti-apartheid years, became a 'cultural weapon.' You had to use it to fight apartheid & some of us resisted that in the end, you recognize that you are facing a government that has no scruples about using culture & art to oppress you.

Kids' literature now is dystopian, you know.

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

Physicists use 'God' as a metaphor more often than other scientists-- especially in popular writing, but in the technical literature as well. Of course, this is just a metaphor for order at the heart of confusion. A rational or aesthetic pattern underlying reality is far from a theistic God.

The Yeas are relatively uniform. They view [Bob] Dylan as one of the greatest artists of his or any era, who deserves to be taken as seriously as any litterateur. Where they vary is in some cases not even accepting the distinction: Dylan in their eyes is a literary titan, and the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature is simply official affirmation of what they already knew.

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.

For me, life without literature is inconceivable. I think that Don Quixote in a physical sense never existed, but Don Quixote exists more than anybody who existed in 1605. Much more. There's nobody who can compete with Don Quixote or with Hamlet. So in the end we have the reality of the book as the reality of the world and the reality of history.

Literature has neglected the old and their emotions. The novelists never told us that in love, as in other matters, the young are just beginners and that the art of loving matures with age and experience.

I attempt to write a good novel. Whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe.

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.

Well, the thing about great fictional characters from literature, and the reason that they're constantly turned into characters in movies, is that they completely speak to what makes people human.

One must always be careful of books,' said Tessa, 'and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.' 'I'm not sure a book has ever changed me,' said Will. 'Well there is one volume that promises to teach one how to turn oneself into an entire flock of sheep-' 'Only the very weak minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry,' said Tessa, determined not to let him run wildly off with the conversation.

Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism. The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

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.

Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art.

Take the time to discover how African-Americans have had a great impact on this country. In science, education, literature, art, and politics.