Quotes About Literature

English is, from my point of view as an Americanist, an ethnicity. And English literature should be studied in Comparative Literature. And American literature should be a discipline, certainly growing from England and France, Germany, Spain, Denmark, and the Native traditions, particularly because those helped form the American canon. Those are our backgrounds. And then we'd be doing it the way it ought to be done. And someday I hope that it will be.

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.

...I have come to make distinctions between what I call the academy and literature, the moral equivalents of church and God. The academy may lie, but literature tries to tell the truth.

The other thing about the Nights is that it is quite racist. One parentheses is that I think this is one of the negative things that appeal to people, that The Arabian Nights could be used as a disguise for racism. It suited the West. You could smuggle racism into children's literature, you see. The African magician in the story of Aladdin, he's labeled explicitly as the "African Magician." He's not a character but a stereotype, and a lot of this got into nursery literature in this Oriental disguise.

I think the number of books published by Mr. Disney has nothing to do with whether or not he is bringing literature to children. That judgment has got to be based on quality rather than quantity. It's the same old problem that continually plagues American culture. I would rather have children playing their own games out of doors in the sunlight than getting the misrepresentation of literature as given by Walt Disney.

Expediency of literature, reason of literature, lawfulness of writing down a thought, is questioned; much is to say on both sides,and, while the fight waxes hot, thou, dearest scholar, stick to thy foolish task, add a line every hour, and between whiles add a line.

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.

Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature.

As long as the state permits itself to interfere in the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere with the affairs of state.

There is nothing so charming as the knowledge of literature; of that branch of literature, I mean, which enables us to discover the infinity of things, the immensity of Nature, the heavens, the earth, and the seas; this is that branch which has taught us religion, moderation, magnanimity, and that has rescued the soul from obscurity; to make her see all things above and below, first and last, and between both; it is this that furnishes us wherewith to live well and happily, and guides us to pass our lives without displeasure and without offence.

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.

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.

For Mythology is the handmaid of literature; and literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.

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 think that Indian writing in English is a really peculiar beast. I can't think of any literature - perhaps Russian literature in the nineteenth century comes close - so exclusively produced by and closely identified with a tiny but powerful ruling elite, the upper-caste, Anglophone upper middle class, and dependent for so long on book buyers and readers elsewhere.

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.

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.

Literature bores me, especially great literature

I think that the Bible as literature should be a compulsory part of the national curriculum.. you can't understand English literature and culture without it. But insofar as theology studies the nature of the divine, it will earn the right to be taken seriously when it provides the slightest, smallest smidgen of a reason for believing in the existence of the divine. Meanwhile, we should devote as much time to studying serious theology as we devote to studying serious fairies and serious unicorns.

...the tale that's told for no other reason but companionship, which is another (and my favorite) definition of literature, the tale that's told for companionship and to teach something religious, of religious reverence, about real life, in this real world which literature should (and here does) reflect.

Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings.

It is a fact that the classics of Yiddish literature are also the classics of the modern Hebrew literature.

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.

Encourage good music and art and literature in your homes. Homes that have a spirit of refinement and beauty will bless the lives of your children forever.

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?"

Jesus claimed He had the power to raise himself from the dead and His followers would be raised from the dead. That's a unique claim in the literature of religion.

We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.

There are days when it seems to me that in literature the most convincing depiction of the world in which we live is to be found in the phantasmagorical kingdom through which Lewis Carroll took Alice on a tour.

Science is a limited way of knowing, looking at just the natural world and natural causes. There are a lot of ways human beings understand the universe - through literature, theology, aesthetics, art or music.

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.

Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none

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?

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.

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.

[Mark] Twain is pointing at you. You, the reader of the book one hundred and thirty years ago and today. That is what has made it a great American novel and the most widely read book in American Literature around the world today.

My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.

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

There are, it is true, at present no great prizes in literature such as are offered by the learned professions, but there are quite as many small ones - competences; while, on the other hand, it is not so much of a lottery.

We turn to literature to remedy the loss, to impose some kind of meaningful order on the nonsequential.

Isn't connecting people to distant lands and culture one of the strengths of good literature?

To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another's life.

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.

If you aren't just brought up in your tribe but interact with other people either directly or vicariously, through journalism and literature, you see what life is like from other points of view and are less likely to demonize them or dehumanize others and more likely to empathize with them.

Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.

Thus if the First Amendment means anything in this field, it must allow protests even against the moral code that the standard of the day sets for the community. In other words, literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.

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.