All classes in proportion to their lack of travel and familiarity with foreign literature are bellicose, prejudiced against foreigners, fond of fighting as a cruel sport -- in short, dog-like in their notions of foreign policy."
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.
My mother is not a woman of ordinary culture. She knows literature and speaks Spanish better than I do. She even corrected my poems and gave me advice when I was studying rhetoric.
If American literature has a few heroes, Miller is one of them. He refused to name names at the McCarthy hearings, and his play 'The Crucible' analysed the hearings in the context of a previous American mass psychosis, the Salem witch trials.
Literature offers the thrill of minds of great clarity wrestling with the endless problems and delights of being human. To engage with them is to engage with oneself, and the lasting rewards are not confined to specific career paths.
Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to go to Oberlin and wanted the liberal arts. Obviously I really get intense pleasure out of drawing connections between pieces and poems and literature and ideas.
During our stay in London for the first time I was able to establish personal contact with some of the organic chemists, whose work I knew and admired from the literature. I found them most gracious and helpful.
I ought to at least be able to read literature in French. I went to an enlightened grade school that started us on French in fifth grade, which meant that by the time I graduated high school I had been at it for eight years.
When I got to college I simply decided that I could speak French, because I just could not spend any more time in French classes. I went ahead and took courses on French literature, some of them even taught in French.
Rizzo the Rat: [falls down a chimney ignoring Gonzo] Hey! I'm stuck! Get me out of here! Gonzo: I knew you weren't suited for literature.
Teacher: The notion of secrecy is central to western literature. You may say, the whole idea of character is defined by people holding specific information which for various reasons, sometimes perverse, sometimes noble, they are determined not to dis...
I would ask: Given the nature of free-market capitalism - where the rule is to rise to the top at all costs - is it possible to have a financial industry hero? And by the way, this is not a pop-culture trend we're talking about. There aren't many fin...
At this point we've answered about every question you could possibly imagine about Deep Space Nine, so we do this thing called Theatrical Jazz, where we do a show of bits and pieces of things from plays and literature, poetry... stuff that we like. I...
'Harry Potter' opened so many doors for young adult literature. It really did convince the publishing industry that writing for children was a viable enterprise. And it also convinced a lot of people that kids will read if we give them books that the...
I wrote "David" because it seemed to me that children, who can love a book more passionately than any grown person, got such a lot of harmless entertainment and not enough real, valuable literature.
Good literature is one key to peace. When we stop reading each other, when we stop paying attention to each other's words and stories, we too easily oppose one another.
Crammed among the stacks of books in his room, the author treated literature as if each book were a window in a city of unstable skyscrapers, and he was the window-washer tasked with the impossible job of cleaning them all. - From "Pageturner" in 365...
I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that's how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. [from "Mingus at the Showplace"]
…the primary trait of young adult literature is that the author’s emphasis is on plot and character and not on his own brilliance. And because few people talk about whether a young adult work is commercial or literary; the two are still in sync, ...
If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins.
In the old days of literature, only the very thick-skinned - or the very brilliant - dared enter the arena of literary criticism. To criticise a person's work required equal measures of erudition and wit, and inferior critics were often the butt of s...
