First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.
Literature is the denunciation of the times in which one lives.
I grew up reading not-serious literature, like comic books and pulp novels, so my instinct is to amuse the reader and entertain.
There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.
I had an older brother who was very interested in literature, so I had an early exposure to literature, and and theater. My father sometimes would work in musical comedies.
In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this – death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.
It was at Juilliard that I realized that being a singer encompasses so many things that I am interested in. Literature, languages, physics, history, art. You really get to explore so many things.
Pop changes week to week, month to month. But great music is like literature.
Without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer.
The power of literature does not lie in resonance with the particular but the way that the particular speaks to a broader, more universal truth.
At Harvard I was taking an African-American studies class, and we were reading about the tragic mulatto. Invariably, the tragic mulatto can’t fit in either world and flings herself off a bridge. So I’m reading, and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, I think I’m in literature,’ but my life was never like that.
The important thing is to do what you most love in the best way. If you love literature, you could be a great writer and perhaps one day become a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature.
The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.
Literature is for the sake of humanity.
I think literature can make familiar the unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar is very much about the dispossessed, and so the value of literature seems to me to go into the stories that not everybody wants to tell.
Literature has always been the greatest fuel for my imagination.
The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.
I think – whether it’s music, literature, sport, art, whatever you want – there’s nobody who can stop us if we only apply ourselves with the singular objective of being the best in the world.
For me, baseball is the most nourishing game outside of literature. They both are re-tellings of human experience.
The thing about literature is that, yes, there are kind of tides of fashion, you know; people come in and out of fashion; writers who are very celebrated fall into, you know, people you know stop reading them, and then it comes back again.
Being a literature major, you know, I’m very familiar with the ways symbolism is used in our sort of mythic tales of society, so anyone who is consciously trying to pull that off I think is really interesting and clearly very smart.
I think of science fiction as being part of the great river of imaginative fiction that has flowed through English literature, probably for 400 or 500 years, well predating modern science.
I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.
Films for TV have to be much closer to the book, mainly because the objective with a TV movie that translates literature is to get the audience, after seeing this version, to pick up the book and read it themselves. My attitude is that TV can never really be any form of art, because it serves audience expectations.
I have been aspiring to write some sort of literature for a long time.
I have a slightly bad back, which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.
Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.
Romeo is the most misunderstood character in literature, I think. He’s hardcore to play because he’s displaying the characteristics of Hamlet at the beginning, and, well, then everything else happens.
You can’t understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can’t recognise biblical allusions.
When I entered college, it was to study liberal arts. At the University of Pennsylvania, I studied English literature, but I fell in love with broadcasting, with telling stories about other people’s exploits.
And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature.
Thinking – in particular abstract thinking, which most of us are introduced to through the study of mathematics and literature – helps us learn that we can become problem solvers.
I finally returned to Iran in 1979, when I got my degree in English and American literature, and stayed for 18 years in the Islamic republic.
There are a lot of people of my generation in New Zealand literature, young writers on their first or second books, that I’m just really excited about. There seems to be a big gap between the generation above and us; it seems to be quite radically different in terms of form and approach.
You become a reader by reading the literature, not by reading the handbooks about it.
It is doubtless one of Aristotle’s great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
Even before Europe was united in an economic level or was conceived at the level of economic interests and trade, it was culture that united all the countries of Europe. The arts, literature, music are the connecting link of Europe.
I went to graduate school with zero expectation. I kind of backed into it. I wanted to go back to school because I felt gaps in my literary background. I studied mostly twentieth-century English literature in college, so I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll go back for my writing.’
I went to Vassar College for undergraduate and studied literature and queer theory, and all of the above. And then I took a Fulbright scholarship in Russia.
The history of thought, of knowledge, of philosophy, of literature seems to be seeking, and discovering, more and more discontinuities, whereas history itself appears to be abandoning the irruption of events in favor of stable structures.
I think one of the saddest things that’s happening to literature is that it’s getting over-simplified by this diet of simple political ideas.
Well, the thing about great fictional characters from literature, and the reason that they’re constantly turned into characters in movies, is that they completely speak to what makes people human.
In America, the only truly popular art form is the movies. Most people consider painting a hobby and literature, schoolwork.
For kind of sophisticated art I’m interested in, the larger structural rebuke has to be so subtle that it has to be distributed at an almost sub-atomic level. Otherwise, you fall into the kind of preachy, moralistic fable that I don’t think makes for good literature.
Literature… is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.
What we value about music and literature are the moments that they create in our minds when we encounter them.
I know for a fact that – it’s just the way our biases work now in the industry of literature, but certainly a short story collection does not receive the same kind of attention as a novel.
I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels… a Library of Congress worth of awful literature.
One of the interesting things about the ‘Decameron’ itself was it was written in the Florentine dialect as opposed to the Latin vernacular – and that was mainly to have it be a piece of literature for the people as supposed to some kind of highfalutin’ canon.
In all highly civilised communities Pretence is prominent, and sooner or later invades the regions of Literature.
There have been a number of us working very, very hard to bring myth and fairy tales into public consciousness, through fantasy literature and other media. I hope we’re succeeding in some small way.
In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.
