Quotes About Literature

Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince. Auden has a line: "Ports have names they call the sea." Just so will literature describe life familiarly, regionally, in terms life is accustomed to use -- high or low matters not. Literature cannot by this impulse betray the grandeur of its subject -- there is only one subject: What it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

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?

Kafka often describes himself as a bloodless figure: a human being who doesn't really participate in the life of his fellow human beings, someone who doesn't actually live in the true sense of the word, but who consists rather of words and literature. In my view, that is, however, only half true. In a roundabout way through literature, which presupposes empathy and exact observation, he immerses himself again in the life of society; in a certain sense he comes back to it.

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.

Seine et Danube was launched in 2003 with the help of Romanian authorities who had finally realized the necessity of promoting literature and Romanian culture in general. Along with focusing on the literature of the countries the Danube traversed (with an emphasis on Romania), we printed work that interested us from the banks of the Seine: French and French-Romanian authors like Cioran and Fondane. We dedicated our last edition to surrealism and Esthetic Onirisme.

Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature.

If the purpose of literature is to illuminate human nature, the purpose of fantastic literature is to do that from a wider perspective. You can say different things about what it means to be human if you can contrast that to what it means to be a robot, or an alien, or an elf.

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.

My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it.

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.

Reality is not an inspiration for literature. At its best, literature is an inspiration for reality.

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.

SF is the literature of the theoretically possible, and F is the literature of the impossible.

I have a passion for children's literature. Young adult literature. I love it. I've always loved it.

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

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.

The press is the exclusive literature of the million; to them it is literature, church, and college.

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?"

Literature is being taught as though it were only political medicine or political poison-a view that is not only illiberal but illiterate.

We are not simply intellectual creatures. We wish to make love, to enjoy a gourmet dinner, to jog in the park, to cheer lustily at a ball game, to engage in spirited conversation with our friends, to play bridge or tennis, travel to exotic places, struggle with others to build a better world, and to enjoy the arts. The arts are so vital because they help to make life worth living. Music, poetry, literature, paintings, dance, and the theater are among our richest joys...The fine arts contribute immeasurably to the good life and that is why we cherish them.

Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance

Life should imitate romance literature far more often.

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.

In life there are two things which are dependable. The pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of literature.

Kids' literature now is dystopian, you know.

English literature is a flying fish.

[N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don't care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a state of intoxication; the minute you get the easy touch of the real craftsman with centuries of civilisation behind him, you get literature.

I studied English literature; I took 2 independent religion classes, but I wasn't a religion major really.

Small presses take chances. Chances are at the heart of all the literature we later know as great.

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

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

The age was still dark and reeked of the havoc and misfortunes of the Goths who had put all good literature to destruction. But, by God's goodness, in my time light and dignity were returned to letters, and I see there such improvement that today I would have great difficulty being admitted to the most elementary classes--I, who in my time was reputed to be (and not wrongly) to be the most knowledgeable person of the century.

That's the great thing about literature -- it makes the world less lonely.

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

Literature is analysis after the event.

Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.

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

A responsibility of literature is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.

Good writing is almost the concomitant of good history. Literature and history were joined long since by the powers which shaped the human brain; we cannot put them asunder.

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.

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.

Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.

Women from fashion magazines, they hate other women. They like to tell other women they are ugly and often it works. Women's magazines are mostly about the outside and not about the inside. About make-up instead of arts and literature. Its such a shame.

I feel more confident and more satisfied when I reflect that I have two professions and not one. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other. Though it's disorderly it's not so dull, and besides, neither really loses anything, through my infidelity.

Just as composers go to concerts and artists visit galleries, writers read. You will learn, in the most enjoyable way, more about style and language from reading good literature than you will ever acquire from workshops and how-to books.

A book does not discriminate against any reader. All are welcome at the table of literature.

Several of us linguists at that time would record our own kids, just to get some data. There was some literature on it then, but no day-by-day, blow-by-blow examples. I recorded all my children over the years in some shape or form. It's what linguists do. You don't talk to a linguist without having what you say taken down and used in evidence against you at some point in time.