Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Some may want to shout on the street, but we should tolerate those who hide in their rooms and use literature to voice their opinions.
Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.
One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.
When a man is treated like a beast, he says, 'After all, I'm human.' When he behaves like a beast, he says 'After all, I'm only human.
You don't say, like the Bush crowd, 'I got this guy over here and I don't like him and I'm gonna get him, whether you back me or not.'
Critics are the eunuchs of literature. They stand by in envious awe while the whole man and his partner demonstrate the art of living.
Take all that is given whether wealth, love or language, nothing comes by mistake and with good digestion all can be turned to health.
I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature.
When a man is discontented with himself, it has one advantage - that it puts him into an excellent frame of mind for making a bargain.
The message of guidance that neither politics nor philosophy nor religion now seems able to provide, we look for in modern literature.
Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity.
I first encountered Bradbury's writing when I was pretty young. He's a great bridge author between young-adult fiction and literature.
The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.
The battlefield is first and foremost horrible stenches, not sights, not sounds, but stenches. They don't travel well into literature.
Literature is man's exploration of man by artificial light, which is better than natural light because we can direct it where we want.
Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.
An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.
I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else.
Neither Western donor countries like the U.S. nor poor recipients like Cameroon care much about Africans who are poor, rural and female
Jim said that bees won't sting idiots, but I didn't believe that, because I tried them lots of times myself and they wouldn't sting me.
I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.
Although charismatic, James Dean is no Harrison Ford. In the majority of his movies, sooner or later he got the crap beaten out of him.
Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.
Unfortunately, your reputation often rests not on your ability to do what you say, but rather on your ability to do what people expect.
I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.
No human being ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at a time, which makes me suspect that we hear too much of it in literature.
A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.
There is something that is much more scarce, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.
We criticize, copy, patronize, idolize and insult but we never doubt that the U.S. has a unique position in the history of human hopes.
Cows are my passion. What I have ever sighed for has been to retreat to a Swiss farm, and live entirely surrounded by cows - and china.
Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.
The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.
Every culture has contributed to maths just as it has contributed to literature. It's a universal language; numbers belong to everyone.
I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.
Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.
Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.
I was once a student in a punk T-Shirt hooked on screwed-up scenarios. Thats how I became the esteemed cultural figure that I am today.
We will always have more to discover, more to invent, more to understand and that's much closer to art and literature than any science.
Thought is a process of exaggeration. The refusal to exaggerate is not infrequently an alibi for the disinclination to think or praise.
Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.
This profession [photography] is deserving of attention and respect equal to that accorded painting, literature, music and architecture.
The most certain thing you can say about the environment tomorrow is that it probably is going to be just like today, for the most part.
Just so long as all our literature is pervaded with the thought that women are inferior, so long will our sex be held in a low estimate.
What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.
I'm trying to earn a living in the way that is most enjoyable to me. I love the world of literature, and I hope to support myself in it.
This is the most intimate relationship between literature and its readers: they treat the text as a part of themselves, as a possession.
When for so long you can't get a job for reasons that seem specious, you you finally do have it, you are constantly afraid of losing it.