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"It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion."
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Exlpore more Literature quotes
"The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth."
"There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the species, that we lie beyond comprehension. Our embarrassments, our sulks, our envy, our feelings of guilt, these phenomena are conveyed in Austen in a way that affords us bursts of almost magical self-recognition. The author has located words to depict a situation we thought ourselves alone in feeling, and for a few moments, we see ourselves more clearly and wish to become whom the author would have wanted us to be."
"Character in decay is the theme of the great bulk of superior fiction."
"Stories are like children. They grow in their own way."
"These fragments I have shored against my ruins."
"A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors."
"Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince."
"In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself."
"It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then."
"Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon."
Explore more quotes by Isaac Asimov
"Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest."
"Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not."
"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"
"John Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war."
"A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value."
"No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be."
"How then to enforce peace? Not by reason, certainly, nor by education. If a man could not look at the fact of peace and the fact of war and choose the former in preference to the latter, what additional argument could persuade him? What could be more eloquent as a condemnation of war than war itself?"
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