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Literature Quotes
"Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated."
13
"That is a secondary teacher conception - the writer as an observer."
13
"Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure."
13
"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."
13
"No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys it, even if he doesn't get paid."
13
"In America, we have the feeling of the doomed young artist. Fitzgerald was the great example of that."
13
"I've been missing Japanese literature so much of late."
13
"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."
13
"Its highest point was The Worst Journey in the World. Then you see this decline, and this harking back, using the 19th-century form when we're not in the 19th century. That way of writing a book about the world out there - you just can't do it anymore."
13
"My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own."
13
"My book is traditional. It runs counter to the post-modern spirit."
13
"Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree."
13
"All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what's cool."
13
"In the western part of England lived a gentleman of large fortune, whose name was Merton."
13
"The first epics were intended for recitation; the literary epic is meant to be read."
13
"I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer."
13
"When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had."
13
"Many scholars forget, it seems to me, that our enjoyment of the great works of literature depends more upon the depth of our sympathy than upon our understanding. The trouble is that very few of their laborious explanations stick in the memory. The mind drops them as a branch drops its overripe fruit. ... Again and again I ask impatiently, "Why concern myself with these explanations and hypotheses?" They fly hither and thither in my thought like blind birds beating the air with ineffectual wings. I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men."
13
"He seemed to hasten the retreat of departing light by his very presence; the setting sun dipped sharply, as though fleeing before our nigger; a black mist emanated from him; a subtle and dismal influence; a something cold and gloomy that floated out and settled on all the faces like a mourning veil. The circle broke up. The joy of laughter died on stiffened lips."
13
"A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study."
13
"Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions."
13
"Writing is finally play, and there's no reason why you should get paid for playing."
13
"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."
13
"The characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level ' there weren't any images of them, no physical tangibility whatsoever. They were pictures in the reader's head, constructs of imagination and ideas, given shape by the writer's work and skill and the reader's imagination. Parents, of a sort."
13
"Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world, I said, "but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld *hope* their own world to be-it isn't a mirror, it's an aspiration."
13
"The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have."
13
"You didn't understand the poem, but that was because it wasn't for you. It was for me to understand the pain you put me through."
13
"Every man's memory is his private literature."
13
"The more we have known of the really good things, the more insipid the thin lemonade of later literature becomes, sometimes almost to the point of making us sick. Do you know a work of literature written in the last, say, fifteen years that you think has any lasting quality? I don't. It is partly idle chatter, partly propaganda, partly self-pitying sentimentality, but there is no insight, no ideas, no clarity, no substance and almost always the language is bad and constrained. On this subject I am quite consciously a laudator temporis acti."
13
"We all knew the book well because it's the cult book in Latin America. For me, this was a sacred territory. I would not have ventured into it by myself."
13
"She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer descriptions."
13
"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."
13
"I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?"
13
"Lastly, literature and philosophy both allow past idols to be resurrected with a frequency which would be truly distressing to a sober scientist."
13
"I haven't stuck to any formula. Most great writers stick to the same style, but I wanted to be more various."
13
"Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street."
13
"The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper - whether little or great, it belongs to Literature."
12
"Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?"
12
"I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis."
12
"If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays."
12
"I imagine that my characters have become much more complicated than when I first began, which would be normal."
12
"A book that furnishes no quotations is no book - it is a plaything."
12
"I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing."
12
"Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem."
12
"The fact that at the moment the distinction is being made, a young adult, as opposed to an adult, is the one reading it. In other words, I don't entirely believe in the distinction. A great book is a great book, and it's impossible to say what part of a person is going to connect to it."
12
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