A lot of my stories are inspired by Japanese folklore or literature or movies: I’ve done stories based on Kabuki and Noh plays, and on Kurosawa’s ‘Yojimbo’ movies.
I look at western literature and especially North American literature, and I feel like it gets bogged down so much with all of that, with domestic stories and relationships and a woman dealing with the loss of her husband.
I went to college at Harvard, then did three years of graduate school at Yale. At both places I studied comparative literature. People find it odd that I went to both Harvard and Yale, and I guess it is odd, but that’s just what people did where I grew up.
At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.
My mother’s father taught English literature. When I was about ten or eleven, I could recite Macaulay’s ‘Lays of Ancient Rome.’ While other kids were playing pedestrian war games, I’d be Horatius keeping the bridge.
The orphan in children’s literature allows the child protagonist to move the story forward themselves. I think that, however happy a family, every intelligent child thinks: ‘How did I come to be born to these parents?’ – it is about finding your place in the world.
I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don’t make many films about the world of a poet.
I’d probably want to teach at university, because children would drive me insane. I suspect it would be English literature, Shakespeare and so forth. I’ve always been deeply, deeply in love with that kind of thing.
I didn’t make any money from my writing until much later. I published about 80 stories for nothing. I spent on literature.
Over the years, I began to understand that there were a lot of people out there reading physics in popular literature that they could not understand – not because it was too advanced, but because it wasn’t advanced enough.
My mother is not a woman of ordinary culture. She knows literature and speaks Spanish better than I do. She even corrected my poems and gave me advice when I was studying rhetoric.
Every man’s work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
And Marx spoke of the fact that socialism will be the kingdom of freedom, where man realizes himself in a way that humankind has never seen before. This was an inspiring body of literature to read.
I had all the normal interests – I played basketball and I headed the school paper. But I also developed very early a great love for music and literature and the theater.
In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at King’s, especially the discovery of French and German literature.
The genre has moved into this commercial aspect of itself, and ignored this extraordinarily rich literature that’s filed everywhere else except under travel.
If I’ve ever regretted anything, it was putting all my eggs in one basket, holing up and kneeling at the altar of literature, instead of going out and at least reviewing, running around and trying to write for magazines. That would’ve been the intelligent thing to do, but I didn’t, and that was because of fanaticism.
I read a lot of war literature.
In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.
The object of Literature is to instruct, to animate, or to amuse.
Literature is reflecting what is happening in life. More and more women are having relationships with younger men. It’s partly that women are not losing their figures now.
Literature is capable of being a subject that people want to catch up on or discuss, whether at a coffee shop or a watercooler. It can become an intrinsic part of their dialogue.
The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.
Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.
I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.
But I also think all of the great stories in literature deal with loneliness. Sometimes it’s by way of heartbreak, sometimes it’s by way of injustice, sometimes it’s by way of fate. There’s an infinite number of ways to examine it.
The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.
The idea behind a dish – the delight and the surprise – makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn’t just ‘Here’s the facts – boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.’ It’s how you tell it.
Literature is about as unnecessarily necessarily as tableware or ironed shirts.
I love the way you can fall in love with a piece of literature; how words alone can get your heart doing that.
I am interested in things happening around me, and I need to understand what’s going on in other artistic sectors like music and literature.
There’s certainly a large literature around baseball in the U.S.
Our points of reference in America aren’t steeped in literature; they’re steeped in that five minutes between commercials.
The cinema occupies an important place in the overall development of art and literature.
It’s interesting to note that all revolutionary literature was written by pastors. These guys were involved in a revolution against the mightiest power that the world had ever seen.
Few are there that will leave the secure seclusion of the scholar’s life, the peaceful walks of literature and learning, to stand out a target for the criticism of unkind and hostile minds.
Full disclosure: I went to university as an eager young feminist for many reasons – to get away from my parents, to soak up literature and knowledge, to cease being a child, to expand my mind and my world.
Literature and philosophy both allow past idols to be resurrected with a frequency which would be truly distressing to a sober scientist.
You know, 20 years… the films of television when it started, the literature, radio in communist countries, they’re clean as a whistle; there was no violence, no sex, no drugs, nothing.
To those of you who study history, economics, sociology, literature and language I present the challenge of the utilization of the enormous resources in our grasp to the problem of creating a genuinely good life for yourselves and your children.
It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race.
Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.
It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
It’s great people still care about books, and it’s great you can still fashion a life from literature.
The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.
When we have spiritual reading at meals, when we have the rosary at night, when we have study groups, forums, when we go out to distribute literature at meetings, or sell it on the street corners, Christ is there with us.
I was a chemistry major, but I’m always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I’ve brought scientific thinking to literature. There’s been very little gratitude for this.
The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature.
All literature is an effort at the formal character of the epigram.
In the early 1970s in Atlanta, I attended what had formerly been an all-white school but had become a black school after integration and white flight. Perhaps because of this, the teachers created a curriculum that included a focus on African American literature and history year-round, not just in February.
Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it’s still coming to computer science.
I don’t think there’s a whole lot of class literature at all. I think most of that has become racially based, and people don’t think of it as being class literature.
Shirley Jackson’s writings are a must for aficionados of the gothic and of good literature.
I’ve loved ‘Vanity Fair’ since I was 16 years old. You know, we’re all colonial hangovers in India, steeped in English literature. It is one of these novels that I read under the covers at my convent boarding school in Simla.
