When I wrote about Mary Wollstonecraft, I found that here she was, in the late 18th century, going to work for the ‘Analytical Review.’ What was the ‘Analytical Review?’ It was a magazine that dealt with politics and literature.
I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming – but he had no literary judgment.
Literature isn’t a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts.
Acquiring a repertoire in these days, when the vocal literature is so immense, so overwhelming, that the student with sense will devote all his energies to work and not imagine himself a martyr to art.
Early Islam was a time of great creativity. Scholars excelled in sciences and literature.
When I got to college I simply decided that I could speak French, because I just could not spend any more time in French classes. I went ahead and took courses on French literature, some of them even taught in French.
In the literature of France Moliere occupies the same kind of position as Cervantes in that of Spain, Dante in that of Italy, and Shakespeare in that of England. His glory is more than national – it is universal.
I love how much love there is in the world of young adult and children’s literature.
I think the job of writing and literature is to encourage each one of us to believe that we’re living in a story.
If you look at the beginning of children’s entertainment in literature, the first books that were written for kids were cautionary tales. They were books that were there to teach kids about growing up and how to live life.
The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.
I always knew when I graduated from high school, I’d go to college. I never thought about what I was walking away from… I just wanted to study literature and writing.
The distinction between literary and genre fiction is stupid and pernicious. It dates back to a feud between Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James. James won, and it split literature into two streams. But it’s a totally false dichotomy.
I was editing Canadian Literature. I didn’t want to let Canadian Literature go, so they reached a nice compromise by which I received half a professor’s salary.
The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.
In many ways, Bengalis and Marathis happen to be very similar. Both love theatre, literature and seafood.
Film is not literature – the image on screen is the information you get.
I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of my job, but increasingly I found myself reading things that weren’t really relevant to my academic work, but were relevant to gardening.
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
In Bosnian, there’s no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there’s no word describing that.
A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature.
Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.
Literature is an easier way to study acting, because then you can take any kind of spin.
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.
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.
Reverence is fatal to literature.
There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.
American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.
The establishment, the newspapers, they try to create something called Scottish literature, but when people are actually going to write, they are not going to necessarily prescribe to that, they’ll write what they feel.
I hadn’t planned on going to law school. I wanted to study 19th-century Russian literature.
Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
Graphic novels are not traditional literature, but that does not mean they are second-rate. Images are a way of writing. When you have the talent to be able to write and to draw, it seems a shame to choose one. I think it’s better to do both.
The amateur is very rare in French literature – as rare as he is common in our own.
The real difference between literature and pulp is the kind of emotional responses they elicit. Dan Brown can’t pierce your heart. Patricia Cornwell can’t make you read a sentence twice and then look sightlessly out of the window.
Escapist literature gets a bad rap. But I think escape is important for a lot of people in a lot of places.
Like many works of literature, Hollywood chooses for its villains people who strive for social dominance through the pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power. But the ordinary business of capitalism is much more egalitarian: It’s about finding meaning and enjoyment in work and production.
Margaret Atwood was the author who took me out of children’s literature and guided me towards adult literature.
I know that for every reader who has lost the habit or can’t find the time, there are people who’ve never enjoyed reading and question the value of literature, either as entertainment or education, or believe that a love of books, and of fiction in particular, is sentimental or frivolous.
That a literature in our time is living is shown in that way that it debates problems.
If what I write is literature, I guess you’d better emphasize the ‘litter.’
A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.
There are even more statues of Robert Burns than of any other figure in world literature. Indeed if we discount figures of religion, then only Christopher Columbus has more statues than he worldwide.
There’s no shortage of orphans in 19th-century literature, but it’s hard to find a single happy, communicative, functional parental relationship in the whole of ‘Great Expectations,’ even among the minor characters.
In the old days of literature, only the very thick-skinned – or the very brilliant – dared enter the arena of literary criticism. To criticise a person’s work required equal measures of erudition and wit, and inferior critics were often the butt of satire and ridicule.
There is a quiet revolution going on in the study of the Bible. At its center is a growing awareness that the Bible is a work of literature and that the methods of literary scholarship are a necessary part of any complete study of the Bible.
Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.
From the beginning of church history, music, writing, literature, and the greatest works of art all came from the church. To change the culture and make it a force for good, you have to be in it and be a part of it.
I didn’t want to be an author; I wanted to be a scientist. Not that I didn’t love literature, but I couldn’t distinguish it from reading, and reading was already my default activity, almost like breathing.
With English literature, if you do a bit of shonky spelling, no one dies, but if you’re half-way through a maths calculation and you stick in an extra zero, everything just crashes into the ravine.
I’m never going to be in danger of getting the Nobel Prize for literature.
Tardiness in literature can make me nervous.
I haven’t been very enthusiastic about the commercialization of children’s literature. Kids should borrow books from the library and not necessarily be buying them.
There were no vampires of note in Western literature until about the 18th century. But they tell us where we park our anxieties, whether its over-powerful women, death or damnation. We make our own monsters.
During our stay in London for the first time I was able to establish personal contact with some of the organic chemists, whose work I knew and admired from the literature. I found them most gracious and helpful.
The rise to prominence of the Saudi novel in Arabic is the great man-bites-dog of recent world literature. Saudi Arabia is a country without a free press, where European styles and forms are distrusted and where the female half of the population became literate only in this generation.
The instinct to impersonate produces the actor; the desire to provide pleasure by impersonations produces the playwright; the desire to provide this pleasure with adequate characterization and dialogue memorable in itself produces dramatic literature.
There’s a wealth of literature out there which, hopefully, will be, you know, exploded in the future, and I personally find it very rewarding to be involved with classic storytelling, and sort of legendary characters.
