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Literature Quotes
"The short story, on the other hand, is the perfect American form."
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"Good stories are like those noble wild animals that make their home in hidden spots, and you must often settle down at the entrance of the caves and woods and lie in wait for them a long time."
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"I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself."
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"But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy."
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"Isaac Singer was born in Poland and doesn't write in English. Still, he's an American."
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"Often something comes in from which you can see that the person is good, the book may not be perfect as it is, and the person doesn't want to do a re-write. That's something we do almost nothing of."
23
"I never reread what I've written. I'm far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I've done."
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"When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all."
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"The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers."
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"We may be willing to tell a story twice never to hear it more than once."
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"The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with the reader's lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that - not very appetizing - food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries."
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"The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order."
23
"Literature doesn't exactly have a strong mental-health track record."
23
"All stories are true, Skarpi said. "But this one really happened, if that's what you mean. He took another slow drink, then smiled again, his bright eyes dancing. "More or less. You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way. Too much truth confuses the facts. Too much honesty makes you sound insincere."
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"The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander."
22
"It seems to me that an author who has determined very new domains in literature is Gertrude Stein."
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"Dialogues must appear as natural as if coming from effortless writing. It must not sweat. Your beloved readers must not sweat. But here am I, literally sweating, because my characters are literally talking dirty in a steamy sweaty and bloody scene."
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"I suppose half the time Shakespeare just shoved down anything that came into his head."
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"The beauty of words that heals my soul."
22
"Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path."
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"A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous."
22
"When you read the psychedelic literature, there is a distinction between the so-called natural psychedelics and synthetic psychedelics that are artificially produced."
22
"Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost."
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"Few things leave a deeper mark on the reader, than the first book that finds its way to his heart."
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"Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality."
22
"I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets."
21
"I love stories with a happy ending, Inspector Me said."
21
"Just why I sent it to the publishers would be hard to say, but when I had finished it I felt that it was literature, because it is real and because it was well written. And I know that the world wants such things."
21
"Stories don't always have happy endings."This stopped him. Because they didn't, did they? That's one thing the monster had definitely taught him. Stories were wild, wild animals and went off in directions you couldn't expect."
21
"You don't find the concept of illicit love at all engaging?"The concept, maybe. But in literature? That's like ordering a glass of tap water at a bar."
21
"Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that it was absolutely the best detail for the circumstance. That wasn't much of a theory, but it was all Ruth could truly commit herself to at the moment. It was time to retire that old lecture, and her penance was to endure the compliments of her former credo."
21
"Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our heats? Can the writer renew our hope for literary forms? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?"
21
"Well, the oil, the oil spot, if you will, is a, is a term in counterinsurgency literature that connotes a peaceful area, secure area. So what you're trying to do is to always extend that, to push that out."
21
"Writing is finally play, and there's no reason why you should get paid for playing."
21
"That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong."
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"She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer descriptions."
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"You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?"
21
"Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street."
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"The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility."
21
"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."
20
"Underground literature only began in the '70s, when technical developments made it possible. Before that, we were involved in a game with the censors. That was our struggle."
20
"Literature shrivels in a universal language, and an uprooted language rots before it dies. And it should be possible to lift the eyes above the cant of the 'language of Shakespeare'... sufficiently to realise the magnitude of the loss to humanity that the world-dominance of any one language now spoken would entail: no language has ever possessed but a small fraction of the varied excellences of human speech, and each language represents a different vision of life ..."
20
"For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page."
20
"In the western part of England lived a gentleman of large fortune, whose name was Merton."
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"First of all, Shakespeare is about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually wrote something for the stage, and he remains so."
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"At last, in 1611, was made, under the auspices of King James, the famous King James version; and this is the great literary monument of the English language."
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