Literature Quotes

My education and background thoroughly inform my writing

Science Fiction is the jazz of literature.

Hemingway said the only way to write about a place is to leave it.

My book is traditional. It runs counter to the post-modern spirit.

Post-modernism is dead because it didn't address human needs.

I'm not an urban person.

I rarely ever put my head above the rampart and see where this big lumbering behemoth called 'global literature' is going.

I wasn't reading it [the Bible] as literature. I was reading it as literature, and as history, and as a moral guide, and as anthropology and law and culture.

Mathematics to me is like a language I don’t speak though I admire its literature in translation.

Film is our literature, so we should tell stories that are apropos of our culture, in that we can learn something about ourselves.

The sermon is now the true poppy of literature.

I've always loved literature, and the best books I read were always trilogies.

What we do as a society is seek simple answers.

One of the things I like enormously about Bob Weinstein is that that he's the only studio head I have ever known who will change his mind and say he was wrong.

I receive about 10,000 letters a year from readers, and in the first year after a book is published, perhaps 5,000 letters will deal specifically with that piece of work.

I have to admit that when I watch a movie in which there is no moral context for the violence - I find that offensive. I think that's potentially damaging to society.

Vladimir Nabokov said the two great evils of the 20th century were Marx and Freud. He was absolutely correct.

In my personal life, I'm a comic novel. But then, so are we all, because we're human beings.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Part of this new world of completely improvisational terrorism is that there were codes of war that disintegrated in the face of terrorism.

I'm passing on a tradition of which I am part. There's a long line of poets who went before me, and I'm another one, and I'm hoping to pass that on to other younger, or newer, poets than myself.

Sometimes the archaism of the language when it's spoken is why we are all in love with the Irish today.

There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

Never underestimate the power of the State to act out its own massive fantasies.

I've always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that's where I belong, that's where my work belongs.

America was and is the immigrant's dream.

I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.

I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world.

Censors are necessary, increasingly necessary, if America is to avoid having a vital literature.

Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device.

I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories.

Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.

For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.

The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.

There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.

A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.

...I have come to make distinctions between what I call the academy and literature, the moral equivalents of church and God. The academy may lie, but literature tries to tell the truth.

We could say that Romanian Onirisme was born from painting and not from surrealist literature. The visual is primordial. Dimov said, 'Dreams are not a source, but a canon, a legislative model.'

Chess hasn't really influenced my literature. It's true, there's a character in Pigeon Post, an old chess player; but it's more of a wink, a self-portrait and not much more.

In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit an harmonious design or an inspirational tone.

I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.

England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.

England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature--for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk.

Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.

The sort of poetry I seek only resides in objects Man can't touch - like England 's grass network of lanes 100 years ago, but today he can destroy them and only Lord Farrer keeps him from doing it.

We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.

My evolution into becoming a photojournalist started with falling in love with literature when I was a teenager, falling in love with novels and imagining a life of being a storyteller.

I am actuated by an ambition which I believe to be an honourable one — the ambition of serving the great cause of truth, while endeavouring to forward the literature of the country.

It is with literature as with law or empire - an established name is an estate in tenure, or a throne in possession.

Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.