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Literature Quotes
"On the morrow the horizon was covered with clouds- a thick and impenetrable curtain between earth and sky, which unhappily extended as far as the Rocky Mountains. It was a fatality!"
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"And I always read the English translation and always have conversations with my translator, for example about the names. I always have to approve it."
10
"The concept of industry domination of regulatory agencies was well known and documented in the literature by the 1960s."
10
"I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one."
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"The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it's impossible to make something out of words and not communicate."
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"The Shakespeare that Shakespeare became is the name that's attached to these astonishing objects that he left behind."
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"Don't ask to live in tranquil times. Literature doesn't grow there."
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"The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish."
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"I have to admit that I only read 'War and Peace' when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then."
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"Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature."
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"I suppose half the time Shakespeare just shoved down anything that came into his head."
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"I read, therefore I'm interested in writers."
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"All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare."
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"OEDIPUS:O, O, O, they will all come,all come out clearly! Light of the sun, let melook upon you no more after today!I who first saw the light bred of a matchaccursed, and accursed in my livingwith them I lived with, cursed in my killing."
10
"Oscar Wilde always makes me smile - with respect and admiration. His short stories prove that it is possible to be both sarcastic, even cynical, but deeply compassionate. Just seeing the cover of one of Wilde's books in a bookshop makes me smile."
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"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."
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"What kind of life can you have in a house without books?"
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"Demons were said to be cruel, but a demon would never have been so brutal as this. A demon merely called you by name, threw his arms around you, whispered his plight, understood yours, then took you for his own."
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"Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit."
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"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?"
10
"To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative - the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time."
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"It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much."
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"The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective."
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"Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature."
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"Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?"
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"It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg adress was so short. The laws of prose writing are immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. Fr letter to Maxwell Perkins 1945."
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"Literature delivers tidings of the world within and the world without."
10
"I cannot choose one hundred best books because I have only written five."
9
"First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the English language before. It's astonishing. It pours out of him."
9
"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."
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"Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible."
9
"Mercy!" cried Gandalf. "If the giving of knowledge is to be the cure of your inquisitiveness, I shall spend all the rest of my days in answering you. What more should you like to know?""The names of all the stars, and of all living things, and the whole history of Middle-Earth and Over-heave and of the Sundering Seas," laughed Pippin. "Of course! What less?"
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"There is a difference between fresh and weird. You never want to throw your reader out of the story. Keep it fresh but natural."
9
"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
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"Sad stories make good books."
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"I put off writing the first Left Behind book for a year because I got invited to assist Billy Graham in his memoirs, and had we known what we were putting off for a year, we might not have put it off."
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"There is the outside of a story, and the inside of a story... One is the fruit and may be delicious, but the other is the seed."
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"Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage."
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"After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust and ashes?"
9
"I was guilty of judging capitalism by its operations and socialism by its hopes and aspirations; capitalism by its works and socialism by its literature."
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"While the goal of a book is to create a positive emotional experience for the reader, the goal of the opening is to set the stage, to pull the reader in."
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Idiot, prends cette danse ardente, au lieu de tendre ton bâton.
J'en ai des raisons de voyager encore sur la mer infinie : j'ai perdu l'amour et j'ai bu ma bourse.
Ma belle m'a quitté, j'ai ses haillons pour m'abriter.
Mes gants de vieillard cachent les mains d'un fameux assassin !"
9
"Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality."
9
"Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told."
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"Marks of Identity is, among other things, the expression of the process of alienation in a contemporary intellectual with respect to his own country."
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"And please, stay away from those books you devour. They are putting the most fantastical tales into your head."
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"The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write."
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