So witless did these ideas strike me as being, so sweeping and pompous the way they were expressed, that I associated them immediately with literature.
A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless'...
Life is short, but art is long. Sophocles is dead, but Oedipus lives on…Each of us when we read a great piece of literature is a little more human than befor
That's why literature is so fascinating. It's always up for interpretation, and could be a hundred different things to a hundred different people. It's never the same thing twice.
Vaguely conscious of that great suspense in which we live, we find our escape from its sterile, annihilating reality in many dreams, in religion, passion, art.
Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.
The American's literature is all about being hot and sexy, inspiring a girl and going to bed with her. It focuses on being a hero, saving lives and surviving last, but it has nothing to do with dignity, serenity.
I can Control F to find words and phrases lost in a sea of literature, but why can’t I Control F to find one object among a hoarder’s clutter?
True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.
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.
