Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.
If a comparative-literature major had existed at Harvard College for undergraduates I would have surely gone in that direction.
Just because you put higher-octane gasoline in your car doesn't mean you can break the speed limit. The speed limit's still 65.
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
Religion which lays so many restraints upon us, is a troublesome companion to those who will lay no restraints upon themselves.
One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him.
A recurring theme in the literature of secular humanism is the harsh assault upon traditional religion, especially Christianity.
I grew up reading not-serious literature, like comic books and pulp novels, so my instinct is to amuse the reader and entertain.
Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.
Since philosophy now criticizes everything it comes across, a critique of philosophy would be nothing less than a just reprisal.
The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.
The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.
Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.
Where one person shapes their life by precept and example, there are a thousand who have shaped it by impulse and circumstances.
The man who seeks to please God is the man who people are pleased with. The man who seeks to please others won't satisfy anyone.
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
...every literature, in its main lines, reflects the chief characteristics of the people for whom, and about whom, it is written.
I want literature to open all the doors that I can't open by myself, and to allow me to see things that I wouldn't otherwise see.
At the beginning of the cask and the end take thy fill but be saving in the middle; for at the bottom the savings comes too late.
Dogma, static positions, consonance - all these are obstacles to catching the disease of art, at least in its more complex forms.
If someone knows me and likes me or my work, they're more likely to allow me to tell their story. But it also cuts the other way.
Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.
Pornography is one of the branches of literature - science fiction is another - aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation.
It will, I believe, be everywhere found, that as the clergy are, or are not what they ought to be, so are the rest of the nation.
Leisure without literature is death, or rather the burial of a living man -Otium sine litteris mors est et hominis vivi sepultura
Watching a movie from beginning to end is like reading, because even though what you see are images, they are telling you a story
Savages and modern artists are alike strangely driven to create something uglier than themselves. but the artists find it harder.
You get below the Mason-Dixon line and you have some of the best music, culture, the two races, the literature, and it's so rich.
Beauty attracts us men; but if, like an armed magnet it is pointed, beside, with gold and silver, it attracts with tenfold power.
Film is our literature, so we should tell stories that are apropos of our culture, in that we can learn something about ourselves.
It wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.
There came into the world an unlimited abundance of everything people need. But people need everything except unlimited abundance.
If you interviewed 1,000 politicians and asked about whether the media's "too soft" or "too hard," about 999 would say "too hard."
It is my deliberate opinion that the one essential requisite of human welfare in all ways is scientific knowledge of human nature.
Ends and purposes, whether they exist as conscious or subconscious tendencies, form the wrap and woof of our conscious experience.
I hate England and its hopelessness. I hate [Arnold] Bennett's resignation. Tragedy ought really to be a great big kick at misery.
I saw within Its depth how It conceives All things in a single volume bound by Love of which the universe is the scattered leaves.
A proof of really great art is that it is generally true - it seldom falls into the misapprehensions to which minor art is liable.
I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.
Europe was a very contentious subject in literature and yet jazz musicians still depended on Europe. Now it's not such a big deal.
One thing that literature would be greatly the better for Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and>metaphor.
As a reporter, I approach every situation knowing that everyone has his or her own agenda. It's not a bad thing; it's just a fact.
On almost anything someone does in the computer business, you can go back in the literature and prove someone had done it earlier.
There is much good luck in the world, but it is luck. We are none of us safe. We are children, playing or quarrelling on the line.
If we want to be sincere, we must admit that there is a well-nourished love and an ill-nourished love. And the rest is literature.
I'm not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published.
In literature, the ghost is almost always a metaphor for the weight of the past. I don't believe in them in the traditional sense.
The only fruitful promise of which the life of any individual or any nation can be possessed, is a promise determined by an ideal.
The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.
I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.