The vast literature concerning whistleblowers shows that, far from weird extremists, they are really quite ordinary people: male and female, young and old, junior and senior, no more nerdy or obsessive than most hard workers.
School was rough for me. I was a good student in middle school, but high school wasn’t so fun. I still pulled through, though! I excelled in art, fashion, history and English literature – anything creative. Math and science I struggled a bit more in.
Nineteenth-century English literature I know; 19th-century sewage systems, not so much.
Contemporary literature in the West has shown some signs of ethical change.
All over the world, maybe besides literature, there’s nothing that touches many people as movies do. People see them everywhere.
This is the most intimate relationship between literature and its readers: they treat the text as a part of themselves, as a possession.
A lot of people have no idea that right now Y.A. (young adult). is the Garden of Eden of literature.
At 19, while studying at St Xavier’s College and majoring in literature and sociology, I got my first job as a copywriter. It was at a company called the Script Shop.
I grew up in an non-athletic family, where my parents were interested in music, in literature, in education and art.
A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate.
A great speech is literature.
I’m into fashion because it contains the mood of the day, of the moment – like music, literature, and art.
For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.
I never appreciated ‘positive heroes’ in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more ‘productive’ literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.
Magic Realism is not new. The label’s new, the specific Latin American form of it is new, its modern popularity is new, but it’s been around as long as literature has been around.
Time the great destroyer of other men’s happiness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its possessor.
Exciting literature after supper is not the best digestive.
I like literature, not opinions. I hate opinions.
I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.
I was trained in the ’50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley’s soul and such things.
Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions.
If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.
I rarely ever put my head above the rampart and see where this big lumbering behemoth called ‘global literature’ is going.
Two of my three siblings are older, so I suppose I learned from them and became a very avid reader at a young age, which I think enough cannot be said for what you can discover through literature.
Literature is the stringing together of pictures in words.
The ‘Classics Illustrated’ series was an excellent primer in literature, and I also really enjoyed Zachary Hamby’s mythology books for teens.
There’s a whole form of literature in India which talks about the quest for the perfect man by a woman, where every woman looks for a perfect man but only ends up with half that.
I’m a reader of Chinese literature, I like their films, but also: I’ve had great difficulty getting my work published in China; very little of it has been published there. The first two attempts to have all of my work published, for instance, were refused without any reason ever being given.
The best work of literature to represent the American Dream is ‘The Great Gatsby’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It shows us how dreaming can be tainted by reality, and that if you don’t compromise, you may suffer.
From an early age, I had the idea that writing was truth-telling. It’s on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature – the holy book. There’s nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious, and it should be totally transparent.
A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug.
I’m not writing great literature. I’m writing commercial fiction for people to enjoy the stories and to like the characters.
In French literature, you can choose a la carte; in Spanish literature, there is only the set meal.
As it was, I realized choosing the study of Chinese literature as my life’s work was probably a mistake.
An action movie should, like any other, follow the narrative traditions of literature. That means there should be subtlety, a slow build and a gradual bringing together of all the separate threads of the plot. To see all of it coming together slowly is very rewarding for the audience.
I wanted to be a poet. I fell in love with poetry around eight years old, but not through literature. Instead, it came through hip-hop lyrics and my obsession with reading liner notes. Queen Latifah’s ‘Black Reign’ is the album that stands out the most.
Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn’t primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature.
I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large.
I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.
The two genres that probably take the most flack in literature – they are young adult and romance right now. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these are genres that provide places for women to express desire and love for adventure, for the opportunity to be placed to heroic roles.
I didn’t choose literature. Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side.
People around the world now complain about stressors everyday, and the word shows up throughout professional and lay literature. But in reality there is no such thing as a stressor. Why not? Because nothing has the inherent power to provoke stress.
‘Harry Potter’ opened so many doors for young adult literature. It really did convince the publishing industry that writing for children was a viable enterprise. And it also convinced a lot of people that kids will read if we give them books that they care about and love.
Lastly, literature and philosophy both allow past idols to be resurrected with a frequency which would be truly distressing to a sober scientist.
Science fiction is an amazing literature: plot elements that you would think would be completely worn out by now keep changing into surprising new forms.
As we have sought through the centuries to define ourselves as human beings and as nations through the prisms of history and literature, no small part of that effort has drawn us to the subject of war. We might even say that the humanities began with war and from war, and have remained entwined with it ever since.
Even in the most peaceful communities, an appetite for violence shows up in dreams, fantasies, sports, play, literature, movies and television. And, so long as we don’t transform into angels, violence and the threat of violence – as in punishment and deterrence – is needed to rein in our worst instincts.
Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author’s soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted.
By the time Florence Nightingale got her neurotic hands on Cleopatra, she had been mangled beyond recognition by both history and literature.
The herbalist I met a few times – it was great – she gave me literature about the different processes that an herbalist would do to make medicines from certain herbs and things.
He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.
I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.
The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn… tired of common sense and civilization.
I took two fiction-writing courses in college and majored in literature. I felt that I had a knack though I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a talent. But it scared me. I felt it was a childish thing wanting to write and that I would forget about it eventually.
Monsters are a departure from ‘reality’ in a way that allows for a range of fantastic possibilities. I mean this within the world of literature as well as in regards to art. When I sit down to draw, I’m energized by the possibility of creating a monster. That is where I find beauty and pathos.
