Quotes About Literature

I believe in every possible manifestation of spiritual strangeness. I believe in all possible escapes. The only thing I cannot endure is reality, whatever it may be. I believe that the writer is defined by the constant necessity of creating a world, to depart from this world. Literature is more concerned with misery than with happiness. Writing is directly related to frustration. It is a reflection of personal desperation. The writer is profoundly disgusted with his reality.

Read to live better.

seem to have a very wide spectrum of readers in this country," I said.

A young Mexican student in Paris—the unknown and yet to be published Octavio Paz—approached Beckett with a proposal to translate one hundred poems by thirty-five Mexican writers. This would be financed, as a worthy cultural project, with funds from UNESCO.

I'm a writer, I said. I like long stories.

This mention of Juan Villoro was fortuitous. He is one of Mexico's most illustrious writers, a

D. H. Lawrence, Malcolm Lowry, and Aldous Huxley—all visitors, inspired in their writing by their immersion in Oaxaca—would recognize

Aliens usually missed the point about England by investing its landscape with the passions of its great literature and it had so seldom been seen plainly, without literary footnotes.

I taught from a book called Modern American English. 'You're lucky to have me. I'm a modern American and I speak English, I said.

A woman in the English Department at Fudan University walked with a cane as a result of criticism by Red Guards-she was kicked and beaten for advocating the reading of the Bourgeois feudalist William Shakespeare. But times had changed. This same woman had just been a faculty adviser on a student production of Much Ado About Nothing at the Shanghai Shakespeare Festival in the spring of 1986.

A child's parents should be able to forbid their son or daughter from reading a book of mine or anyone else's. However, those same parents should have zero control over what everyone else's kids can read.

Story of O is one of those books which marks the reader, which leaves him not quite, or not at all, the same as he was before he read it.

He told himself that he would have to start reading thicker books: they lasted longer, and made more comfortable pillows.

When trying to seduce a woman, a writer says: 'I'm a writer', and scribbles a poem on a napkin. It always works.

I read here and there in books, enjoying the examples and ignoring the argument.

Oh, please. If she's going to use Mr. Darcy to prop up her arguments, I give up.

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.

The art of reading is to skip judiciously.

I was much more interested in literature than I was in art. I just got into art by mistake.

The cinema occupies an important place in the overall development of art and literature.

It is unhappily true that much insincere Literature and Art, executed solely with a view to effect, does succeed by deceiving the public.

It was a revelation for me, in a practical sense, that you could write in an African language and still reach an audience beyond that language through the art of translation.

With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible.