Quotes About Literature

I had as yet no notion that life every now and then becomes literature—not for long, of course, but long enough to be what we best remember, and often enough so that what we eventually come to mean by life are those moments when life, instead of going sideways, backwards, forward, or nowhere at all, lines out straight, tense and inevitable, with a complication, climax, and, given some luck, a purgation, as if life had been made and not happened.

life every now and then becomes literature...as if life had been made and not happened.

Mon vœu, quand j'ai commencé à écrire, a été d'être un écrivain roumain. Comme tant d'autres avant moi, qu'ils aient été grecs (I[on] L[uca] Caragiale, Alexandru A. Philippide), arméniens (Garabet Ibr?ileanu), juifs (Mihail Sebastian, Max Blecher) ou de bien d'autres origines, depuis le Géorgien Antim Ivireanul, jusqu'au « russe » Nichita St?nescu.

Hermann Hesse a raison de dire que les textes de Kafka ne sont ni religieux, ni métaphysiques, ni moraux , mais simplement poétiques. (p. 250)

Literature is humanity talking to itself.

One thing you distinctly never want to hear a man you're interested in say softly is that his favorite book in the whole world is The Golden Notebook. Here you are dealing with a liar from the black lagoon and it's time to start feeling in your purse for carfare.

SF] was a commercial genre born in the old adventure pulp magazines of the first third of the twentieth century, aimed primarily at adolescent males, which, over the decades, in fits and starts, evolved into an intellectually credible, scientifically germane, transcendental literature without losing its popular base. Of what other literature in the history of the western world can this truly be said?

A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.

Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows.

La macchina tecnologicamente più efficiente che l'uomo abbia mai inventato è il libro.

Literature's world is a concrete human world of immediate experience. The poet uses images and objects and sensations much more than he uses abstract ideas; the novelist is concerned with telling stories, not with working out arguments.

The story of loss and regaining of identity is the framework, I think, of all literature

Remember too that to me the word myth, like the words fable and fiction, is a technical term in criticism, and the popular sense in which it means something untrue I regard as a debasing of language.

In this perspective what I like or don't like disappears, because there's nothing left of me as a separate person: as a reader of literature I exist only as a representative of humanity as a whole. We

We then discover that we have no word, corresponding to "poem" in poetry or "play" in drama, to describe a work of literary art. It is all very well for Blake to say that to generalize is to be an idiot, but when we find ourselves in the cultural situation of savages who have words for ash and willow and no word for tree, we wonder if there is not such a thing as being too deficient in the capacity to generalize.

Pure mathematics enters into and gives form to the physical sciences, and I have a notion that myths and images of literature also enter into and give form to all the structures we build out of world

Drama is not a genre for infant prodigies: I can't think of a dramatist who made a major reputation as early as, say, Keats or Rimbaud in lyric poetry.

Chi legge è altrove.

There is more truth in their romances than in learned chronicles.

Novels arise out of the shortcoings of history.

Der wahre Leser muss der erweiterte Autor sein.

In any case, I would prefer to read something I don't enjoy than do almost anything else. I like the act of reading in itself. Following the lines of something — not just the story but the rhythm, the tone, the feel of what has accumulated from before and what is beginning to impend — becoming surefooted on the high-wire of the author's intention.

Não nos damos conta, de fato, de que a literatura e os saberes humanísticos, a cultura e a educação constituem o líquido amniótico ideal no qual podem se desenvolver vigorosamente as ideias de democracia, liberdade, justiça, laicidade, igualdade, direito à crítica, tolerância, solidariedade e bem comum.

I have tried my best to keep my country alive by writing about it.