The Arab world also won the Nobel with me. I believe that international doors have opened, and that from now on, literate people will consider Arab literature also. We deserve that recognition.
Literature is the immortality of speech.
In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.
The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self.
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
My favorite literature to read is fairly dry history. I like the framework, and my imagination can do the rest.
I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.
I don’t feel like literature has the power to alienate. I think that’s something people feel if they don’t connect with a work of art. But I don’t think a work of art can actively reject the person who’s looking at it or reading it.
I went to study English for two reasons. Principally because when I was in university, studying drama wasn’t considered an option. You couldn’t get a degree course for it. And so many plays and things that I was interested in landed themselves in a broader spectrum of literature.
I studied English literature; I took 2 independent religion classes, but I wasn’t a religion major really.
It’s a great thing when you feel that you recognize yourself, deeply and movingly, in a work of literature.
I sort of mind living in a time when most of the literature is terribly personal. I suppose it’s because I grew up on a love of history, philosophy, science and religion, but not to think too much about yourself.
I never set out to write literature; I set out to tell stories. And some of my work may be very raunchy and very bloodthirsty – but life, for me, is a violent thing.
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
A Christian philosophy of literature begins with the same agenda of issues that any philosophy of literature addresses. Its distinctive feature is that it relates these issues to the Christian faith.
I think that literature has the important effect of creating free, independent, critical citizens who cannot be manipulated.
Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo clinic.
I would ask: Given the nature of free-market capitalism – where the rule is to rise to the top at all costs – is it possible to have a financial industry hero? And by the way, this is not a pop-culture trend we’re talking about. There aren’t many financial heroes in literature, theater or cinema.
I went to school to study literature and writing, even though I didn’t end up really doing that in the end.
Literature is one of the most interesting and significant expressions of humanity.
Literature offers not just a window into the culture of diverse regions, but also the society, the politics; it’s the only place where we can keep track of ideas.
It is a law woven into the nature of man, attested by history, by science, by literature and art, and by dally experience, that strength of mind and force of character are the supreme rulers of human affairs.
There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.
I’ve often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.
When I’m feeling frustrated with a story, I have faith that it’s going to come. Also, when I first started writing, I wanted to write the stories that were not in my childhood, to represent people who hadn’t historically been represented in literature.
We will have a total chaos without books, literature, and library.
There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.
I love and collect contemporary art and go to all the art fairs. I love Damien Hirst and Matthew Barney. I grew up in Italy and had a humanistic education in philosophy and literature – things I love and appreciate. People are richer and more complex than just their day-to-day professional pursuits might suggest.
I wish that the adults who are ‘in power’ cared more about what their children read. Books are incredibly powerful when we are young – the books I read as a child have stayed with me my entire life – and yet, the people who write about books, for the most part, completely ignore children’s literature.
For someone who loves literature, and all books on principle, being asked to name three titles over a half century of serious reading is akin to asking one to recall their three favorite sunsets.
Journalism is literature in a hurry.
Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.
Literature for me isn’t a workaday job, but something which involves desires, dreams and fantasy.
I think enough cannot be said for what you can discover through literature. So I think that was probably my most valued characteristic as a teenager.
What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably… have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature.
I gradually became persuaded that the subjects, without intending to, had revealed to me a basic truth about markets that was foreign to the literature of economics.
Music enriches people’s lives in the same way paintings and literature do. Everybody deserves that.
Nothing is harmful to literature except censorship, and that almost never stops literature going where it wants to go either, because literature has a way of surpassing everything that blocks it and growing stronger for the exercise.
I’m from Europe, and I was very aware that there are a lot of literature snobs – especially in Europe. As soon as something becomes a success, it has to be bad, and then they’ll do everything they can to stab it to death.
I got my first whiff of what big-time adult literature was all about when I was in 8th grade. I got it from Mark Linn-Baker. You know – the guy from ‘Perfect Strangers.’
I think myself I ought to be shot for writing such nonsense… But it’s unquestionably good escapist literature, and I think I should rather like it if I were sitting in an air-raid shelter or recovering from flu.
I don’t only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and… ants. I can understand ants.
As any student of literature knows, the books that last are often not the books that are most popular when they are written. Both ‘Moby Dick’ and ‘The Great Gatsby’ were complete failures, critically and commercially, when they first appeared.
People have different views of how you deal with different issues in literature, and, frankly, long may it last that there is a range of views.
The birth of the search engine, it’s nothing new: it’s essentially embedded in our literature; it’s how ideas relate, how the mind makes connections. I mean, connections are made online through links, and within an algorithm, they’re made through degrees of relevancy between different terms.
The concept of the robot encapsulates both aspects of technology. On one hand it’s cool, it’s fun, it’s healthy, it’s sexy, it’s stylish. On the other hand it’s terrifying, it’s alienating, it’s addictive, and it’s scary. That has been the subject of much science-fiction literature.
I’m very attracted to exile literature – particularly Nabokov – exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.
I’m not at all snobby about book prizes and how they pollute the world of literature. Just like with the Olympics, a little bit of competition gets people truly engrossed in the business of literature.
Literature can allow us to experience the best side of humankind, where instead of giving up, we struggle desperately in the ruins for love, connection and hope.
My dad’s side of the family had lots of artists and musicians. There’s an emotional, quite sentimental quality to Slavic culture. It’s very open, it loves art, it loves music, it loves literature. It’s very warm, it’s very up, it’s very down. I would celebrate that.
There is a beauty in nature and culture that we no longer have access to. Those things you can’t forget, you embroider… The further you tell, the further you travel from truth, which means, of course, that literature is a lie.
But picketing – picketing for or against something, and handing out literature – these are conspicuously formal actions. They have to be understood as indirect communication.
So much of young adult literature has turned dark, almost pathological. It’s almost as if there is a race to see who can be the most dysfunctional.
Science fiction is a unique literature. Science fiction is the first literature that says, ‘Tomorrow is going to be different than yesterday, it’s going to be a lot different.’
I don’t think any novelist should be concerned with literature.
