I think it’s a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it’s literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it’s romance, or a beach book – in short, it’s something unworthy of a serious critic’s attention.
Literature – novels, plays, and poems – can have an uncanny dual life, where they simultaneously represent something eternal and something historical, and this is often how they are taught in school.
I’m kind of a reluctant Anglophile. My mother’s a children’s librarian, and all of the children’s literature I read was from her childhood – E. Nesbit and Dickens, which isn’t children’s literature at all, but I was sort of steeped in English literature. I thought I was of that world.
Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: ‘The poem’s sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.’
Cock-fighting, which has attained to the dignity of a literature of its own, is the popular Malay sport; but the grand sport is a tiger and buffalo fight, reserved for rare occasions, however, on account of its expense. Cock-fighting is a source of gigantic gambling and desperate feuds.
What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of ‘The Naked and the Dead’ and American literature’s leading heavyweight contender, to Dan Wolf, the delphic editor of ‘The Village Voice.’
There are those who believe we have need of more literature, of a large international publishing house, of a great peace newspaper, or the like. I am rather skeptical about this idea.
Literature is air, and I’m suffocating in mediocrity.
Literature precedes genre.
One of the greatest gifts my brother and I received from my mother was her love of literature and language. With their boundless energy, libraries open the door to these worlds and so many others. I urge young and old alike to embrace all that libraries have to offer.
Literature that keeps employing new linguistic and formal modes of expression to draft a panorama of society as a whole while at the same time exposing it, tearing the masks from its face – for me that would be deserving of an award.
When I was 13 or 14, I started devouring novels; literature took quite a while to take me over, but it caught up just in time to save me from becoming a mathematician.
England opened up the world of literature for me. Not really having a world of my own, I made up for my disinheritance by absorbing the world of others… I loved them: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens… I adopted them passionately.
I don’t think if you’re serious about literature your library is filled with award-winning books.
The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective.
There is grand romance in The Lord of the Rings. It’s an important part of epic literature.
At graduation, I assumed I’d be in publishing, but first I went to England and got a master’s degree in English Literature. And then I came back to New York and had a series of publishing jobs, the way one does.
I do think that part of literature’s job is to comment on and participate in the social issues of the time.
I have no illusions that my work can rouse the masses to create change, because literature simply doesn’t have that power anymore in my country, if it does anywhere. But I do hope that it can be read by those who are in positions to create change, or that it can at least be part of that dialogue.
When I was at school, I was terrible at algebra and arithmetic, but I was always the best at English and literature. And acting, of course.
I always loved science. And in fact, I got a science award in high school. I mean, I loved science, but I think I loved literature more.
It’s in literature that true life can be found. It’s under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.
Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.
I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
Judaism has always been a strong interest of mine. My two sons speak Hebrew and are familiar with the scriptures and with rabbinic literature. This is the way we live.
It is unhappily true that much insincere Literature and Art, executed solely with a view to effect, does succeed by deceiving the public.
Literature throws us many great heroes. Real life invariably outdoes them.
I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into.
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
It’s different in Scotland. People who come to readings are more interested in literature as such, but the readership in general is really quite diverse. It’s a cliche, but it’s said that people who read my books don’t read any other books, and you do get that element.
Istanbul is inspiring because it has its own code of architecture, literature, poetry, music.
I think that Oprah’s on a mission to improve the lives of the average American in various ways. And one of them is to bring literature to people who would normally not be quite as demanding in their reading tastes, to show them writing that can be more than just entertainment.
The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
‘The Lady’s World’ should be made the recognized organ for the expression of women’s opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure.
There were two very distinct voices going on in my head and I moved easily between them. One had to do with sports, street life and establishing myself as a male… The other voice, the one I had from my street friends and teammates, was increasingly dealing with the vocabulary of literature.
Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.
Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.
Psychology, unlike chemistry, unlike algebra, unlike literature, is an owner’s manual for your own mind. It’s a guide to life. What could be more important than grounding young people in the scientific information that they need to live happy, healthy, productive lives? To have good relationships?
Today there is a division between those who write about literature and those who create it. I, obviously, don’t think that should be there.
And I found both literature and the church very dramatic presences in the world of the 1950s.
As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.
If people aren’t creating literature, there would be nothing for people to criticize.
Literature gives us a window into other people’s experiences in other places, in other times, so I thought it would be really interesting to investigate how different people had written about motherhood, and childhood.
I was lucky enough to be a child during the renaissance of Australian children’s literature, when people like Ivan Southall, Colin Thiele, Lilith Norman and Wrightson were pumping out hugely inspiring stuff.
I want to knock on people’s doors and preach. But I also meet a lot of people on planes and in restaurants, and you can preach with them or place some literature with them.
How any person decides to emphasize strengths and mitigate weaknesses is something people have to figure out for themselves. I’m wary of the self-help literature that suggests there are certain rules. I’m very happy for people to look at my story and say it’s possible to achieve many things.
The most watched programme on the BBC, after the news, is probably ‘Doctor Who.’ What has happened is that science fiction has been subsumed into modern literature. There are grandparents out there who speak Klingon, who are quite capable of holding down a job. No one would think twice now about a parallel universe.
My books are shelved in different places, depending on the bookstore. Sometimes they can be found in the Mystery section, sometimes in the Humor department, and occasionally even in the Literature aisle, which is somewhat astounding.
Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round.
I went to university in the north of England at University of Birmingham to do an English literature degree, and I knew I could do extracurricular stuff with theater and drama. I started a theater company, called Article 19, and I did it with a bunch of friends. I wrote and directed plays. I had a radio show.
