What hadn’t been realized in the literature until now is that merely to describe how severely something has been tested in the past itself embodies inductive assumptions, even as a statement about the past.
There isn’t a lot of poverty literature in the young-adult world. And I don’t know why that is, but I think certainly I felt a gap.
The whole world recognizes Russia’s cultural achievements. It is impossible to imagine the world culture without Russian culture, without our music and literature.
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
Anyone who reads advice books about romance has one problem to begin with: bad taste in literature.
There are still some people out there who believe comic books are nothing more than, well, comic books. But the true cognoscenti know graphic novels are – at their best – an amazing blend of art literature and the theater of the mind.
What I do know is that writing is the thing I am best at, and I don’t have the stomach, the ability, the strength or the courage to enter the political arena. And I think writing can be a political act, if only to let those people accountable know they are being watched. Literature can be a conscience.
I am in the interesting position of being sometimes skimmed by the critics and called literature and sometimes called historical fiction.
In a way, ‘Billy Elliot’ was autobiographical. I can’t dance, but I think his dancing was me discovering about writing and literature.
The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.
You see Michelangelo and Picasso and you read literature. I had some innate inchoate yearning for that, but I never really saw where I would fit in. That’s called art. And then something happened to pop music, which is that it became art under the hand of the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan and some other people.
We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
I think it is a quest of literature throughout the ages to describe the human condition.
English dramatic literature is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare; and it is almost inevitable that an English reader should measure the value of other poetic drama by the standards which Shakespeare has already implanted in his mind.
Calling one thing ‘literature’ and another ‘fiction’ is a way to create status where there is none.
I had always had an affinity for series in literature, and I thought it would be really cool to incorporate what I loved about books into the story of music, to pile it together.
Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake.
Lovers of literature will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism.
Art and literature should help us to get out of our mental cocoons.
Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.
We used to flock to watch gladiators, public torture and executions. In more recent times, our appetite for mortal violence has been sublimated in sports, photorealistic video games, film and literature.
Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.
Every game, and almost every life situation, has short cuts: ways you can get better without learning the entire literature of the game from beginning to end.
The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
My mother was a teacher, and when she wanted to show me art and literature and science, she’d take me to museums, parks and free exhibitions.
Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!
When I was young my Father used to tell me that the two most worthwhile pursuits in life were the pursuit of truth and of beauty and I believe that Alfred Nobel must have felt much the same when he gave these prizes for literature and the sciences.
The Nobel Prize has given me, for the first time in my life, the feeling that my literature could be appreciated on an international level.
The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.
There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don’t.
Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There’s an objective and a subjective camera, like there’s a third- and a first-person narrator in literature.
When they were done downloading all the information off each hard drive, they took all the computers, all the literature, and loaded everything into a big white truck and left.
Politics is marginal, but literature moves along by indirection.
