Lucknow, as far as I have heard, is always known for its culture, literature and poetry. So it has set a cultural benchmark for the entire country.
Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don’t think so… I have to compete with popular culture, including TV, magazines, movies and video games.
Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience.
The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.
The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.
When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.
The crown of literature is poetry.
I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.
Honestly, I feel you are poisoned if you read too much of the scientific literature because it makes you start thinking like other people. You’re better off having a vague sense of what’s going on and making your own way.
We shall suffer no attachment to literature, no taste for abstract discussion, no love of purely intellectual theories, to seduce us from our devotion to the cause of the oppressed, the down trodden, the insulted and injured masses of our fellow men.
Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction.
Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
It seems to me that in literature, books have always been answers to other books.
Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.
I left school at 16 but I wish I’d gone to university – I think I would have studied English literature. I had a knack for that. But I don’t think you have the kind of wisdom at 16 to make that decision.
I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to SF … No other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the present, let alone the future.
The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.
In the history of literature there are many great enduring works which were not published in the lifetimes of the authors. If the authors had not achieved self-affirmation while writing, how could they have continued to write?
Eroticism is born at a time in civilisation when sexual instinct becomes deanimalised and enriched with contributions from art and from literature. A world of theatricality emerges around the act of love.
I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not nationally known as being a literary family, though my mother and my mother’s side of the family in general were interested in literature.
I think that Poe is so resonant because he represents that part of us that is in misery or sorrowful or wants to explore the darkness. He wrote a great story called ‘The Imp of the Perverse’ about the instinct towards self-destruction. Poe is the godfather of Goth literature and that whole movement.
A movie is painting, it’s photography, it’s literature – because you have to have the screenplay – it’s music. Put a different soundtrack to a comedy and it’s a tragedy. A movie combines all those forms and forces you to pay attention for two hours with a group of people.
An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
Horror fans are a particular breed. They analyze films with such detail and expertise that I am reminded of the Canadian literary critic Northrup Frye, who approached literature with similar archetypal analysis.
All of us use art and literature as an escape from time to time, but if it’s any good, it has a healing quality – a quality that enlarges our human spirits.
I read a lot of heavy literature when I’m on set, so on holiday I want to indulge in something light-hearted.
If you aren’t just brought up in your tribe but interact with other people either directly or vicariously, through journalism and literature, you see what life is like from other points of view and are less likely to demonize them or dehumanize others and more likely to empathize with them.
There’s a long history of anthropomorphic animals in Japanese literature. The so-called ‘funny animal scrolls’ were the first narratives in Japanese history, and the heroes of many folk tales have animals as their companions.
The causes of crime are very complicated. But there is a very big literature, as you know, about single parenthood in crime, about race in crime, and about poverty in crime.
A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance.
I consider what I write to be literature. I choose the words carefully.
Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
When I came to America, I was already a writer, already published in Bosnia. I was planning to go back, but I had no choice but to stay here after the civil war, so I enrolled at Northwestern in a master’s program and studied American literature.
The Russian yearning for the meaning of life is the major theme of our literature, and this is the real point of our intelligentsia’s existence.
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
All prizes have a role, if they are run with integrity and with a clear focus on reading and quality writing. I don’t think any of them is necessary, but they all play an incredibly important role in building a body of literature, in introducing new authors to new readers, and extending reading.
‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’ is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature, written by the great poet Basho in 1689.
In the Nordic countries, there are hardly any societal problems, but we writers are bloodthirsty people like anyone else, so we have to quench this thirst with literature. If you live in a mafia state with lots of violence on the streets, you tend to write beautiful poetry.
Plot is to literature what individual holes are to miniature golf.
The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
If you read Islamic creationist literature, it’s pretty much lifted from American evangelical literature.
Encourage good music and art and literature in your homes. Homes that have a spirit of refinement and beauty will bless the lives of your children forever.
Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.
Each person has a literature inside them.
A lot of performing instincts are involved in the business of direction, but so is analysis and having a sense of literature.
Naturally I drew register a little exaggerated, in order to create something new in the sense of a sublime literature that sings of despair only in order to oppress the reader, and make him desire the good as the remedy.
All the questions discussed in the Talmud and related rabbinic literature are normative questions: either they are questions of what one is to think or what one is to do. Every prescribed thought has some practical implication; every prescribed act has some theoretical implication.
Literature – Eastern and Western – abounds with stories, myths, legends about the search for youth, for eternal life.
Postmodernism cost literature its audience.
I have a lot of feminist idols. My favorite thing about growing up in Arkansas – well, not favorite but something I’ve always felt grateful for – was that I really had to dig for what I could. There was no Internet. There wasn’t tons of feminist literature floating around.
That helped me to keep in touch with myself and to keep in touch with this really quite extraordinary language and literature into which I had pushed a little way.
Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.
It’s not like since I make comics I only read comics and since I make movies I will only go out and watch movies. Any kind of artistic expression interests me; it goes from literature to music to sculpture, painting; whatever is extremely inspiring for me becomes a reference also for me.
