The writer studies literature, not the world.
Literature, of course, is not a contest.
It is, of course, traditional in children’s literature to get rid of the parents.
For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.
The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.
I studied literature and Italian at Yale. I wrote my thesis about Italo Svevo, one of my heroes.
The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery.
When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.
On almost anything someone does in the computer business, you can go back in the literature and prove someone had done it earlier.
During half a century of literary work, I have endeavoured to introduce the philosophy of evolution into the sphere of literature, and to inspire my readers to think in evolutionary terms.
Hemingway’s remarks are not literature.
Literature is analysis after the event.
I get up at an unholy hour in the morning my work day is completed by the time the sun rises. I have a slightly bad back which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.
Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience… from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible.
Good literature can be created only with something that is different from literature.
Bad literature is a form of treason.
You may take this as a general and central principle in criticism: that all science, literature or song, which recognizes conscious life as the ruling principle of the universe, is Christian.
I didn’t read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else.
I love to read different books on completely different subjects at the same time. I cannot focus on one. I read a few pages of literature, then I jump to philosophy and at the same time I’m reading biographies of Mahler.
When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man’s name live for thousands of years.
The Bible is literature, not dogma.
Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading.
I didn’t choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to the place.
My stories are full of facts; they have a beginning and an end. For that reason, they will never… occupy a place in contemporary literature.
When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen. But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can.
You’re meant to think somehow that literature, in espousing eternal values, is kind of normal and balanced and reasonable. When it fact it’s anything but.
I was given the ability to create stories and characters. That’s my part of the long chain of writers, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, and a host of others who eventually deliver literature to the world. I want to do for others what Eudora Welty did for me.
I am not a Ph.D. in economics or a doctorate in literature that I can afford to take my singing lightly. Even if I sing a jingle, I take it as seriously as oxygen.
Some writers like to boil down headlines of liberal newspapers into fiction, so they say there shouldn’t be communal riots, everybody should love each other, there shouldn’t be boundaries or fundamentalism. But I think literature is more than that; these are political views which most of us hold anyway.
I recommend for any basic course on the Beat Generation to familiarize yourself with ‘The Idiot,’ Prince Myshkin. He was Dostoyevsky’s idea of the most beautiful human being he could imagine, the creation of a saint in literature.
Wherever you look there are inspirations, books, literature, paintings, landscapes, everything. Just living is an inspiration.
Personal experience is the basis of all real Literature.
I have many books that I want to write; I’d like to think that I’ll be around for another 20 years or so and write another dozen novels, probably some sort of imaginative literature… Never again another seven-volume saga.
I never, as a reader, have been particularly interested in dystopian literature or science fiction or, in fact, fantasy.
My intention throughout has been to write, to create literature, and to be able to look people in the eye after I’d done it – the people I’d written about.
If the future, as imagined in literature, is really the present taken to extremes, then the past is also the present, but boiled down.
In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life.
The novel succeeds on terms exclusive to literature. A good film succeeds on terms exclusive to the cinema. That’s why so many bad novels can become good movies, like ‘Jaws’ or ‘The Godfather.’
Canada has always been a great place for literature. It’s strong and growing stronger, and there will always be reading, and there will always be great writers.
Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to go to Oberlin and wanted the liberal arts. Obviously I really get intense pleasure out of drawing connections between pieces and poems and literature and ideas.
White people use their literature to maintain culture. That’s why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels.
Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It’s endless. I’m sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds.
One of the great themes in American literature is the individual’s confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent.
It was a combination of an intense interest in children’s literature, which I’ve always had, and the feeling that I’d just have a go and see if I could do it.
For Mythology is the handmaid of literature; and literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.
When literature exists, perhaps we do not notice how important it is, but when it does not exist, our lives become coarsened and brutal. For this reason, I am proud of my profession, but also aware of its importance.
I didn’t know much about Texas when I moved there for graduate school. In my first or second semester, I took a class in life and literature of the Southwest, and that’s where I first heard about these events along the border in 1915-1918, what Anglos called the Bandit Wars.
At the age of 12 I won the school prize for Best English Essay. The prize was a copy of Somerset Maugham’s ‘Introduction To Modern English And American Literature.’ To this day I keep it on the shelf between my collection of Forester’s works and the little urn that contains my mother’s ashes.
The medical literature tells us that the most effective ways to reduce the risk of heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and many more problems are through healthy diet and exercise. Our bodies have evolved to move, yet we now use the energy in oil instead of muscles to do our work.
If you look at the purported dangers of salt or fat, there is no consensus of support in scientific literature. So I would ask first: ‘Is it possible to have an informed government that actually follows the science?’ From what I’ve seen, it’s not likely.
If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.
In some ways, getting published in children’s literature is a little more open than publishing adult literature. It’s less hinged on who you might know.
Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.
‘The Gambler’ by Dostoevsky. It was the first time I realised that it was possible to have good and evil in one person. It led me to read a lot of Russian literature.
I think the genre of comics sometimes overtakes the medium, and people assume that they are kind of frivolous. If you have a good, strong story teller, they can be as affecting as any character in literature. Period.
