Quotes About Literature

True literature engages what is concealed in fate and hidden in the human soul; it exists in the metaphysical realms.

Only much later did I understand that this raw material is the very marrow of literature, and that, from it, it's possible to create an interior narrative. I say "interior" because at that time chronicles were considered to be where truth was to be found. "Interior" expression had not yet been born.

Unless you find yourself in a book, you have a hard time finding anybody else.

If I have a creed, this is it: My god is language, written and read. And there is no other god but this.

The characteristic feature of contemporary literary radicalism is that it rarely addresses the question of its own determination by the conditions of its production and the class location of its agents. In the rare case where this issue of one's own location-- hence of the social determination of one's own practice-- is addressed at all, even fleetingly, the stance is characteristically that of a very poststructuralist kind of ironic self- referentiality and self-pleasuring.

Because boys are boys, and books are books, and, in the end, it's best to have a little bit of both.

The paper burns, but the words fly away.

In matters of both film and literature I owe much to my brother's discernment. I took special care to see every film my brother recommended. As far back as elementary school I walked all the way to Asakusa to see a movie he had said was good.

With my head crammed full of art, literature, theater, music and film knowledge, I continued to wander, vainly looking for a place to make use of it.

For me, filmmaking combines everything. That's the reason I've made cinema my life's work. In films, painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.

The idea of transmigration hardly appears in the Hindu ?g Veda (12th–8th century B.C.E.), though by the time the new religious movements arose in the sixth to fifth centuries B.C.E., most of the important ones included a philosophy of transmigration, outstanding examples being Buddhism, Jainism, and the religion of the ?j?vikas. We also find the idea in Brahmanism in the new literature called the Upani?ads .

You'll never be alone if you've got a book.

twenty years after McCauley's effort, I concluded that it was time to prove, once and for all, that the horror and suspense genre is a serious literary one. I had other reasons

It began to falter not when the book publishers who loved books gave way to those who preferred profits to reading. It happened when publishers and editors cut back on their drinking. If there is one national flower in book publishing, it is the martini.

the golden age had to be the years from 1946, as the harrowing savagery of World War II was washing away, to the late 1970s and early 1980s, before the era of publishing ossification had fully set in. Ossification had begun in the 1960s when the great old-line book people began to be replaced by bottom-line businessmen.

The patron saint of Viking could not stand editors who claimed to have discovered an author. "The author is not a discovery," Huebsch always insisted. "The author is the discoverer." Maybe so, but I still maintain that it is the editor who has to dig out the pearl in the sand pile and clean it up.)

ONE THING I almost forgot about the rise and fall of the golden age described here. It began to falter not when the book publishers who loved books gave way to those who preferred profits to reading. It happened when publishers and editors began cutting back on their drinking.

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.

Existe un perpetuo ir y venir entre la lectura y el beso, circunstancia de la que dan fe numerosos ejemplos literarios.

The word "avant-garde," for example, despite its note of impartiality, generally serves to dismiss-as though by a shrug of the shoulders-any work that risks giving a bad conscience to the literature of mass consumption.

One of the good things about Larkin is that he still has you firmly by the hand as you cross the finishing-line, whereas reading Auden is like doing a parachute-drop: for a while the view is wonderful, but then you end up on your back in the middle of a ploughed field and in the wrong county.

The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.

The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.

Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.