Quotes About Literature

the wholeness. There is also the sense of a self merged and at least temporarily erased—it is deathlike. . . . Perhaps we owe some of our most moving literature to men who didn't understand that they wanted to be women nursing babies. (Louise Erdrich)

the day when male writers can speak for women is speeding by. Fast.

Anyone who shoots a real gun at you when drunk and angry is simply not husband material, regardless of his taste in literature.

But the not-very-highbrow truth of the matter was that the reading was how I got my ya-yas out. For the sake of my bookish reputation I upgraded to Tolstoy and Steinbeck before I understood them, but my dark secret was that really, I preferred the junk. The Dragonriders of Pern, Flowers in the Attic, The Clan of the Cave Bear. This stuff was like my stash of Playboys under the mattress.

you've clearly been charged with hiring a jack-of-all-trades. And Dr. Auden is that mythical creature you seek: fully qualified to teach British and American literature, women's studies, composition, creative writing, intermediate parasailing, advanced sword swallowing, and subcategories and permutations of the above.

the literature student has learned to inquire, to question, to interpret, to critique, to compare, to research, to argue, to sift, to analyze, to shape, to express. His intellect can be put to broad use. The computer major, by contrast, is a technician - a plumber clutching a single, albeit shining, box of tools.

I would outlaw literature exams entirely; I would also eschew the twin barbarities of 'attendance' and 'participation' as grading criteria, necessitated by workload increase.

If every member of the human race evinced a fondness for literature and even a moderate level of dexterity with the written word, I would be a happier, if not more well-adjusted, man.

As for me, the closest I have come to exaltation has been here at the university, with a book in my hand. Literature has served me faithfully (no pun intended) as an ersatz religion, and I would wager that the pursuit of the ineffable via aesthetics in various forms has saved as many foundering souls as a belief in god.

I never wanted to become an actress because I'd read great literature or seen great Shakespeare. It was more just wanting to understand what the people were really like, why they said all the strange things they did.

A history of literature, unlike history as such, ought to list only victories, for its defeats are no victory for anyone.

The literature of impotence is about to develop beyond measure.

Here we are in the century of information, that is to say the unformed. Every kind of literature will be journalistic, with a science for ballast.

After Chaucer's death, Henry IV offered his position to Christine de Pizan, no doubt hoping that as she was a widow and her only child, her sixteen-year-old son, was effectively a hostage in his household, she could be persuaded to agree. If so, he completely misjudged this redoubtable woman, who had once replied to criticism "that it was inappropriate for a woman to be learned, as it was so rare . . . that it was even less fitting for a man to be ignorant, as it was so common.

De cuando en cuando me ocurre vomitar un conejito.

The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with it a tangible loss but also a total engagement that, on another level, lends the theater its unparalleled imperfection faced with the perfection of film. I don't want to write anything but takes.

The modern story begun, one might say, with Edgar Allan Poe, which proceeds inexorably, like a machine destined to accomplish its mission with the maximum economy of means.

Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature

The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.

Por lo que me toca, me pregunto si alguna vez conseguiré hacer sentir que el verdadero y único personaje que me interesa es el lector, en la medida en que algo de lo que escribo debería contribuir a mutarlo, a desplazarlo, a extrañarlo, a enajenarlo.

During his reading hours, which were between one and five o'clock in the morning, but not every morning, he had come to the disconcerting conclusion that whistling was not an important theme in literature.

Lo que pasa es que se creen sabios -dice de golpe-. Se creeen sabios porque han juntado un montón de libros y se los han comido.

Me di cuenta de que ser un escritor latinoamericano significaba fundamentalmente que había que ser un latinoamericano escritor: había que invertir los términos y la condición de latinoamericano, con todo lo que comportaba de responsabilidad y deber, había que ponerla también en el trabajo literario.

Nuestra verdad posible tiene que ser invención, es decir escritura, literatura, pintura, escultura, agricultura, piscicultura, todas las turas de este mundo. Los valores, turas, la santidad, una tura, la sociedad, una tura, el amor, pura tura, la belleza, tura de turas.