Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.
It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.
If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.
Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.
Magazines all too frequently lead to books and should be regarded by the prudent as the heavy petting of literature.
Our points of reference in America aren't steeped in literature; they're steeped in that five minutes between commercials.
The cinema, as literature, as all the plastic arts, do not exist outside of a critical system that allows us to study them.
In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.
Of course, there were other sorts of literature -- theoretical, self-referencial, lachrymosely autobiographical -- but they were just dry wanks.
Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.
The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.
Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for 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.
Lovers of literature will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism.
The world of scholarship is much more measured in its appreciation and also its criticism than the world of popular literature.
Reading a great work of literature can truly be likened to having a conversation with a great mind.
The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.
A history of literature, unlike history as such, ought to list only victories, for its defeats are no victory for anyone.
It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.
Without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer.
