Quotes About Literature

'The Lady's World' should be made the recognized organ for the expression of women's opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure.

Books about women and children are not valued in the same way as a book about war. And why is that? I don't know.

We can celebrate how far we've come from our sexist past when women and men are equally represented in the pages of science fiction anthologies.

A theme that has always interested me is how women express anger, how women express violence. That is very much part of who women are, and it's so unaddressed. A vast amount of literature deals with cycles of violence about men, antiheroes. Women lack that vocabulary.

I do not use the language of my people. I can take liberties with certain themes which the Arabic language would not allow me to take.

Themes around education and learning run through my work.

I have a vision of artists putting into film, drama, literature, music, and paintings great themes and great characters from the Book of Mormon.

The problem with themes is that writers don't realise they are themes until someone points them out.

Themes only arise after a novel is written, and people begin to try to talk about it.

Of course theater will always be associated intimately to literature, but the themes or whatever have to penetrate you by the senses. Theater is a sensuous experience, and that's its main difference from film or any other dramatic art.

In the century-long history of Chinese science fiction, apocalyptic themes were mostly absent. This was especially true in the period before the 1990s, when Chinese science fiction, isolated from the influence of the West, developed on its own.

Six-hundred-page biographies of German theologians aren't known to fly off the shelves.

I don't think I could write a novel that wasn't theological.

The people that usually have the most trouble with my books are the ones that pick them apart from a theological point of view.

Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I'm attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

All the questions discussed in the Talmud and related rabbinic literature are normative questions: either they are questions of what one is to think or what one is to do. Every prescribed thought has some practical implication; every prescribed act has some theoretical implication.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

I've purposely stayed away from reading much about postmodern theory, and most everything I have read just bored me to tears. I don't think anybody's written about it, or very few have, with any verve.

Naturally, my stories are about women - I'm a woman. I don't know what the term is for men who write mostly about men. I'm not always sure what is meant by 'feminist.' In the beginning, I used to say, 'Well, of course I'm a feminist.' But if it means that I follow a kind of feminist theory, or know anything about it, then I'm not.

I love the three-act theory. It works and works beautifully. But you don't necessarily have to structure a story that way: Cortazar and Borges wrote in different structural styles.

My theory is that sometimes writers write books because they want to read them, and they aren't there to be read. And I think that was true of me.

There's a statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to work, they'd eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this isn't true.

Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.