Quotes About Literature

In an anthropological respect, let me reiterate, a human being is an aesthetic creature before he is an ethical one. Therefore, it is not that art, particularly literature, is a by-product of our species' development, but just the reverse. If what distinguishes us from other members of the animal kingdom is speech, then literature – and poetry in particular, being the highest form of locution – is, to put it bluntly, the goal of our species.

Susan, Susan -- Poetry: aviation! Prose: infantry. [to Susan Sontag]

Un romanzo o una poesia non è un monologo, bensì una conversazione tra uno scrittore e un lettore: una conversazione, ripeto, del tutto privata, che esclude tutti gli altri – un atto, se si vuole, di reciproca misantropia.

Nothing reveals a poet's weakness like classical verse, and that's why it's so universally dodged.

Il poeta, ripeto, è il mezzo di cui la lingua si serve per esistere. O, come ha detto il mio amato Auden, è colui in cui e per cui la lingua vive.

sono certo, certissimo, che un uomo che legge poesia si fa sconfiggere meno facilmente di uno che non la legge.

The reason English-speaking readers can hardly tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is because they read neither prose. They're reading Constance Garnett.

To translate knowledge and information into experience: that seems to be the function of literature and art.

One of the great disadvantages of a literary or scriptural tradition like the biblical one is that a deity or context of deities becomes crystallized, petrified at a certain time and place. The deity doesn't continue to grow, expand, or take into account new cultural forces and new realizations in the sciences, and the result is this make-believe conflict we have in our culture between science and religion.

There was indeed a " frightful lot" of books. The four walls of the library were plastered with them from floor to ceiling, save only where the door and the two windows insisted on living their own life, even though an illiterate one.

Chum was a British boy's weekly which, at the end of the year was bound into a single huge book and the following Christmas parents bought it as Christmas presents for male children.

There is something of the preacher essential in every Russian intellectual. It is in our blood; it has been instilled by the whole of Russian literature in the last generations

I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.

That's a wonderful change that's taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

Jika ingin menjadi seorang penulis pertama sekali kena membaca, kedua kena membaca, ketiga, membaca, keempat membaca dan kelima baru menulis.

Max said little. His essential quality was always to say little, but by powerful empathy for writers and for books to draw out of them what they had it in them to say and to write.

Max sent Scottie some literary advice, the same dictum he gave every college student who called on him. He stressed the importance of a liberal arts education but urged her to avoid all courses in writing. "Everyone has to find her own way of writing," he wrote Scottie, "and the source of finding it is largely out of literature.

There's a good feeling about them. It's something I like to find in fiction. So many writers master form and technique, but get so little feeling into their work. I think that's important.

He stressed the importance of a liberal arts education but urged her to avoid all courses in writing. "Everyone has to find her own way of writing," he wrote Scottie, "and the source of finding it is largely out of literature." Scottie

Before Perkins nobody at Scribners had edited so boldly or closely as he did Fitzgerald, and some of the older editors considered the practice questionable. They liked Max and sensed his ability, but they did not always understand him. In small ways as well as large, Max was different.

One did not have to sell like Hemingway, Davenport, Hale, Rawlings, Weston, or Taylor Caldwell to get Perkins's backing. In fact, his heart went out most readily to the person who desperately desired to be a writer but who could not produce a good book.

Emerson lectured and wrote treaties and essays, and masses of clotted, cabbagey poetry. Reading him is like trying to hack your way through a swamp of creeping verbiage.

The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief—call it what you will—than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counterattractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course.