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.

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 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.

Literature usually begets literature.

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.

You can say that literature is about topics like love, death, and all that, but I think there is only one topic that applies to all literature and that is belonging.

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 delighted when people respond with passion and readily intensity to my work. Literature is not as the economist would put it a positional good; in other words, there is infinite space for good literature.

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 fantasy stories we learn to understand the differences of others, we learn compassion for those things we cannot fathom, we learn the importance of keeping our sense of wonder. The strange worlds that exist in the pages of fantastic literature teach us a tolerance of other people and places and engender an openness toward new experience. Fantasy puts the world into perspective in a way that 'realistic' literature rarely does. It is not so much an escape from the here-and-now as an expansion of each reader's horizons.

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.

Literature is the adventure. It's the story, it's the fight, it's people falling in love, it's people with deep personality disorders who succeed anyway beyond themselves. That's what great literature is.

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.

In journalism, if there's a hole in your story you figure out a way around it because you've got a 4 p.m. deadline. It's a neat skill to have but it's deadly for literature. In literature, you need to stare at that hole, not ignore it. You need to figure it out.

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature…literature should be left to essayists.

Fantasy is a literature particularly useful for embodying and examining the real difference between good and evil. In an America where our reality may seem degraded to posturing patriotism and self-righteous brutality, imaginative literature continues to question what heroism is, to examine the roots of power, and to offer moral alternatives. Imagination is the instrument of ethics. There are many metaphors besides battle, many choices besides war, and most ways of doing good do not, in fact, involve killing anybody. Fanstasy is good at thinking about those other ways.

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.

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.

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.

Literature has low enough standards. But we can avoid writing the worst literature if we make ourselves ask ourselves, every two or three sentences we write, 'Is that what I really think?'

So often, literature about African people is conflated with literature about African politics, as if the state were somehow of greater import or interest than the individual.

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 don't fear death. I'm not obsessed with it the way everybody else seems to be. It's wrong to say "everybody," but in literature I see it all the time - preoccupation with it, philosophical preoccupation, in fact. That's a principle element of literature and philosophy, often cited as the main element, the only real element. I say give it up.

It is customary for the recipient of this award to offer personal or scholarly comment on the nature and the direction of literature. At this particular time, however, I think it would be well to consider the high duties and the responsibilities of the makers of literature.

...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.

The destination of the soul: this is what I, led on by Nils Holgersson, came to seek in the literature of Western Europe. I fervently hope that my pursuit, as a Japanese, of literature and culture will, in some small measure, repay Western Europe for the light it has shed upon the human condition.

The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend on it for their daily bread and the highest form of literature, Poetry, brings no wealth to the singer.

Until you can become accountable to yourself and only yourself, you're probably not going to live a fully vital life. So much of literature is about accountability. The moral issues in most novels are about people becoming responsible for their own behaviour. One of the forces against being responsible for your own behaviour is the force of the past, in the way that the past tries to form you.

I’m just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it recreates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, it’s far closer to the miraculous creation of life than, say, a painting or music or even literature. It’s not just an art form; it’s actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies. It’s my way of telling a story.

Naturally I drew register a little exaggerated, in order to create something new in the sense of a sublime literature that sings of despair only in order to oppress the reader, and make him desire the good as the remedy.

The battlefield is first and foremost horrible stenches, not sights, not sounds, but stenches. They don't travel well into literature.

My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.

Chairman Mao creatively applied Marxism-Leninism to every aspect of the Chinese revolution, and he had creative views on philosophy, political science, military science, literature and art, and so on. Unfortunately, in the evening of his life, particularly during the "Cultural Revolution", he made mistakes - and they were not minor ones - which brought many misfortunes upon our Party, our state and our people.

Before college, I hadn't voluntarily read anything that might be called literature; I didn't think I'd understand it; I never seemed to understand my English teacher's interpretations of what we read.

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

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.

To encourage literature and the arts is a duty which every good citizen owes to his country.

All bad Literature rests upon imperfect insight, or upon imitation, which may be defined as seeing at second-hand.

I think it's restrictive to typecast myself as a novelist because I enjoy other forms of expression. I love literature and I love cinema.

How people make gardens is bound to reflect a way of experiencing the natural world, while at the same time this experience of nature is bound to reflect a culture - ways of painting nature, for example, or representing nature in literature, or of course making gardens.

Without a sense of place the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego.

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.

All literature, is, finally autobiographical.

Literature is an inquiry into the deepest yearnings of the human spirit.

One of the stories that dominates our family literature was the fact that my maternal grandfather contracted for - I don't know under what terms - but, for a large section of the old slave plantation. He established himself - sisters and brothers, cousins, etc. on fifty- and sixty-acre plots.

I think it is important to reach people through arts and literature, because then you establish a connection that's not an instant crisis.

The impulse to perfection cannot exist where the definition of perfection is the arbitrary decision of authority. That which is born in loneliness and from the heart cannot be defended against the judgment of a committee of sycophants. The volatile essences which make literature cannot survive the clichés of a long series of story conferences.

The Bible contains some of the most sublime passages in English literature, but is also full of contradictions, inconsistencies, and absurdities.