I had never kissed a boy, had never even considered that I might enjoy such an unclean thing, until literature opened my eyes.
I trained as a writer before I became a lawyer. I was headed for a life as an English professor, but that just wasn't me. I'm not a scholar; I didn't have a scholar's attitude toward literature.
Ever since childhood, I've been interested in history and myth. Not just the facts and figures of the past, but everything that contributes to shape our perception of an age: architecture, art, literature and so forth.
Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.
Two of my three siblings are older, so I suppose I learned from them and became a very avid reader at a young age, which I think enough cannot be said for what you can discover through literature.
The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art.
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.
The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn... tired of common sense and civilization.
I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.
I suppose it's true that most great television, literature, and other forms of high art (and basic cable) benefit from a little hindsight. 'M.A.S.H.' comes to mind. So does 'The Iliad.'
All of us use art and literature as an escape from time to time, but if it's any good, it has a healing quality - a quality that enlarges our human spirits.
I believe love at first sight is possible. Centuries of literature and art and beauty has been dedicated to that idea, so who am I to argue, even if I've never experienced it?
For years, I had heard about the lack of interest in literature in the U.S. and I had complained about it. I failed to understand how people could fail to be moved by art.
Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.
She could, she thinks, have entered a different life. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.
We have just discovered our dear colleague butchered in a hotel room, and you wish to discuss literature?
I regained my soul through literature after those times I'd lost it to wild-eyed gypsy girls on the European streets.
That's what sofas are for: sit down, drink a cup of tea, talk of literature. At least that's how I see it.
Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?
That is one of the functions of art: to present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude.
