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...
More people work at Walmart than anywhere else in the United States, but you wouldn't know that from our literature. I'm trying to get at the reality of this country by portraying the lives of many of my friends who I left behind in Pittsburgh.
When I came to America, I was already a writer, already published in Bosnia. I was planning to go back, but I had no choice but to stay here after the civil war, so I enrolled at Northwestern in a master's program and studied American literature.
We can sum up the surrealist distinction between 'literature' and 'poetry' by saying where the former is artificial, fictive and elusive, the latter is natural, real, direct and spontaneous.
The first prerequisite for fine literature is that the writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must struggle with to make it do one's bidding.
But this lump does not absolve me, because I got it through heedlessness, not though courage. I run my tongue over my lip and what do I do? I write. But bad literature brings no redemption.
Granted, there is always much that is hidden, and we must not forget that the writing of history - however dryly it is done and however sincere the desire for objectivity - remains literature. History's third dimension is always fiction
The topography of literature, the fact in fiction,is one of my pleasures -- I mean, where the living road enters the pages of a book, and you are able to stroll along both the real and imagined road.
There’s a different flavor to children’s literature you read after you grow up than there was reading it as a child. Things that were sweet as a child become bitter once you grow up.
You see Michelangelo and Picasso and you read literature. I had some innate inchoate yearning for that, but I never really saw where I would fit in. That's called art. And then something happened to pop music, which is that it became art under the ha...
For kind of sophisticated art I'm interested in, the larger structural rebuke has to be so subtle that it has to be distributed at an almost sub-atomic level. Otherwise, you fall into the kind of preachy, moralistic fable that I don't think makes for...
My dad's side of the family had lots of artists and musicians. There's an emotional, quite sentimental quality to Slavic culture. It's very open, it loves art, it loves music, it loves literature. It's very warm, it's very up, it's very down. I would...
I never had the idea of moving to Paris and becoming something. I liked the idea of living in Paris because it seemed to have so many parts of life I really enjoyed. The people there seemed to prize literature and art, food and drinking, a more hedon...
In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this - death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have ha...
The literature of impotence is about to develop beyond measure.
There's no better way to inform and expand you mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature.
Well-wrought poems and works of imaginative literature can do for us what stone-cold prose can never do. They can help us grasp the full dimension of ways of life other than our own.
It is very rarely that a middle-aged man finds an author who gives him, what he knew so often in his teens and twenties, the sense of having opened a new door.
It is, of course, not only impossible for readers to know the intention of most, if not all, writers, but an author himself may think he is writing one thing while he is in fact writing something quite different.
He builds whole world of imagery and passion, any one of which would have served another writer for a whole book, only to pull each of them to pieces and pour scorn on it.
We do not enjoy a story fully at first reading. Not till curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savor the real beauties.
