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.
Because of literature we can decipher, at least partially, the hieroglyphic that existence tends to be for the great majority of human beings.
He turned the presidency – and the President's House – into something it had not been before: a center of curiosity and inquiry, of vibrant institution that played informal but important roles in the broader life of the nation, from science to li...
If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter...
I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time.
A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.
Language, because it is imperfect, cannot encompass experience in its raw and primal condition. To verbalize emotion and action is to decrease their impact.
I've loved 'Vanity Fair' since I was 16 years old. You know, we're all colonial hangovers in India, steeped in English literature. It is one of these novels that I read under the covers at my convent boarding school in Simla.
The Arab world also won the Nobel with me. I believe that international doors have opened, and that from now on, literate people will consider Arab literature also. We deserve that recognition.
T.S. Eliot was one of the first poets introduced to me when I started studying literature and has felt like a close friend ever since. No one nails urban despair quite like Eliot.
I do not think of literature as something confessional or therapeutic. I make sentences in order to be precise about experiences and things. I am urged by many things and no things in particular.
The real difference between literature and pulp is the kind of emotional responses they elicit. Dan Brown can't pierce your heart. Patricia Cornwell can't make you read a sentence twice and then look sightlessly out of the window.
A creative writing workshop will contain students whose ambitions and abilities, whose conceptions of literature itself, are so diverse that what they have in common - the desire to write - could almost be considered meaningless.
Horror fans are a particular breed. They analyze films with such detail and expertise that I am reminded of the Canadian literary critic Northrup Frye, who approached literature with similar archetypal analysis.
The reason I write romance is that I like happy endings. The idea, you know, 'It's not literature unless is ends badly,' and I really don't like that. There's enough misery and bad things happening in the world.
I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels... a Library of Congress worth of awful literature...
With literature, sometimes a book is presented in the media as being say, a Muslim story or an African story, when essentially it's a universal story which we can all relate to it, no matter what race or social background we come from.
Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination, and of the heart.
Literature is my calling To hold up the mirror to my countrymen comes natural to me; and in the open field of invention I am not without hopes of giving them pleasure.
I read recently that the problem with stereotypes isn't that they are inaccurate, but that they're incomplete. And this captures perfectly what I think about contemporary African literature. The problem isn't that it's inaccurate, it's that it's inco...
For someone who loves literature, and all books on principle, being asked to name three titles over a half century of serious reading is akin to asking one to recall their three favorite sunsets.
