Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Whomever you're going to interview, you have to be interested in what it is you want to know from them. You have to be interested in the subject.
For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.
A man can become so accustomed to the thought of his own faults that he will begin to cherish them as charming little 'personal characteristics.'
I have to believe that literature can effect change; otherwise, I would have no purpose in my life and would have wasted four years on Ilustrado.
When literature becomes deliberately indifferent to the opposition of good and evil it betrays its function and forfeits all claim to excellence.
I wrote for a weekly magazine and then edited a literary magazine, but I did not really feel comfortable with the profession of journalism itself
The hope in literature is that we are allowed to be imperfect, to write of our imperfection, without being overly critiqued for being unlikeable.
It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for the future, none at all. It certainly is extraordinary, but it is certainly true.
All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.
The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn.
To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality.
You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.
We have increasingly fewer and fewer journalists who have any military experience and understand what life is like in the military and in combat.
It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.
Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.
A country house is not the same as a house in a country and a hotel in the country is not the same as a hotel in a town but is it in a small town.
Here we are in the century of information, that is to say the unformed. Every kind of literature will be journalistic, with a science for ballast.
The Vedic literature opens to us a chapter in what has been called the education of the human race to which we can find no parallel anywhere else.
No one wants to know how clever you are. They don't want an insight into your mind, thrilling as it might be. They want an insight into their own.
As a student in England, I studied French and English literature. I read L'Etranger and the rhythm of the novel felt familiar to me - very African.
Artistic simplicity is more complex than artistic complexity for it arises via the simplification of the latter and against its backdrop or system.
The problem with literature, with writing, is that it works sometimes in terms of correction of social ills. Other times, it just does not suffice.
Cognition is not fighting, but once someone knows a lot, he will have much to fight for, so much that he will be called a relativist because of it.
There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.
The planned sit-down reception is an artificial forum where one is presented with a limited number of persons with whom he can hold a conversation.
When you know what men are capable of you marvel neither at their sublimity nor their baseness. There are no limits in either direction apparently.
Progress is measured by richness and intensity of experience - by a wider and deeper apprehension of the significance and scope of human existence.
If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry.
English literature is a kind of training in social ethics. English trains you to handle a body of information in a way that is conducive to action.
The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.
My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it.
If I could have gone on describing to you the beauties of this region, who knows but I might have made a fine addition to the literature of our age?
Know the difference between principles based on right or wrong vs. principles based on personal gain, and consider the basis of your own principles.
In Britain, the great hidden secret of talking animals and children's literature is how political it was in its bones, beneath the obvious cuteness.
The failure of modern living is the failure of the imagination...Literature is the royal road that enables us to enter the realm of the imagination.
Then the administration tied it in to the regional dispute between Israel and its enemies, as if that's about international terrorism. No, it's not.
False shame accompanies a man that is poor, shame that either harms a man greatly or profits him; shame is with poverty, but confidence with wealth.
Freud did some serious damage to American literature - a lot of writers began therapy in the 1940s, after which they all became terribly egocentric.
Do you know-I hardly remembered you? Hardly remembered me? I mean: how shall I explain? I-it's always so. Each time you happen to me all over again.
We thought that whatever we wanted to do was right and good, simply because we were Americans, and we would succeed at it because we were Americans.
The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them.
The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.
The thing that is incredible is life itself. Why should we be here in this sun-illuminated universe? Why should there be green earth under our feet?
Many openly show discontentment with their looks, but few with their intelligence. I, however, assure you there are many more plain minds than faces.
We're supposed to see "universal" love as heterosexual. What I insist upon in my work is that there is no such thing as universal love in literature.
I think enough cannot be said for what you can discover through literature. So I think that was probably my most valued characteristic as a teenager.
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
Those are the two things: a sense of loving and being loved, and being creative - that is what life is made up of, and what literature reminds us of.
The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.
I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.