Best 5099 quotes in «literature quotes» category

It did occur to me that the effect of good literature may be as dizzying as that of alcohol.

It does not prove a thing to be right because the majority say it is so.

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native criminal class except Congress.

It doesn't serve an American interest. It really doesn't really serve Israeli interests - it serves the interests of the political party that's getting the votes of the settlers on the West Bank.

Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.

I thank fate for having made me born poor. Poverty taught me the true value of the gifts useful to life.

It has become evident that the primary lesson of the study of evolution is that all evolution is coevolution: every organism is evolving in tandem with the organisms around it.

It has become a certainty now that if you will only advertise sufficiently you may make a fortune by selling anything.

It has been wisely observed by the greatest of modern thinkers that mankind has progressed more rapidly in every other respect than in morality.

It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.

I think all writers of my age who are brought up on films probably by the age of 16 have seen many more films than they have read classics of literature. We can't help but be influenced by film. Film has got some great tricks that it's taught writers.

I think American literature is in a tedious place, horrible place. I can't even engage with it.

I think enough cannot be said for what you can discover through literature. So I think that was probably my most valued characteristic as a teenager.

I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.

I think I'll work all my life. When you're having fun, why stop having fun?

I think in general there's no point in going into a field like English literature if you're not going to have fun with it.

I think it is a quest of literature throughout the ages to describe the human condition.

I think it is an important question of our lives - what is the meaning of literature to us as humans.

I think it's dangerous to be optimistic. Things could go terribly wrong virtually overnight

I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs - when I was 17 - that I realized I was talking through an empty skull... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts.

I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world.

I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath.

I think literature is somehow both a fantasy and a reality we should all get back to.

I think New York is working its way into my poems. It takes a while for a place to filter its way onto the page, but I've been reading more and more American poetry and I certainly feel it as quite a freeing force. Coming from the formally ordered tradition of poetry in Ireland, I find the expansiveness of American literature freeing in some sense.

I think most writers feel like they're on the outside looking in much of the time... All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us.

I think now I'm up to something like 85 different titles that I've published.

I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature's ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms.

I think that men know how to romance a woman and most do it well, at least for a time, otherwise women wouldn't marry them. The problem is that most of them begin to rest on their laurels.

I think that's a result of just a general increase in speed of the vibration of life itself.

I think that literature quite often emerges from areas where there has been a lack of articulation, like women's writing.

I think that my biggest attribute to any success that I have had is hard work. There really is no substitute for working hard.

I think that things happen individually first, and then collectively. It's not the other way around.

I think there is something about coming to a city to work that puts you in touch with it in a different way.

I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood.

I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.

I thought I’d been condescended to as an Indian - that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing Y.A.

I think the world is full of evil people. I think in some ways we're in more danger now than before.

I think you can find all the elements that you can find in great literature in mundane experiences.

I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.

I thought they would never select an Eastern writer for the Nobel. I was surprised.

It is a comfortable feeling to know that you stand on your own ground. Land is about the only thing that can't fly away.

It is a fact that the classics of Yiddish literature are also the classics of the modern Hebrew literature.

It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.

It is a sign of creeping inner death when we can no longer praise the living.

It is also said of me that I now and then contradict myself. Yes, I improve wonderfully as time goes on.

It is always safe to learn, even from our enemies; seldom safe to venture to instruct, even our friends.

It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing.

It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.