Best 5099 quotes in «literature quotes» category

Is it strange, then, that in a literature so concerned with realism and with personal liberation this refusal and impoverishment of the life of the spirit have always nourished the screamers, the eccentrics, the pseudo-Whitmans, the calculating terrorists?

Islamic myths are mostly actually plagiarized from the Christian ones, both biblically and in terms of modern creationism. If you read Islamic creationist literature, it's pretty much lifted from American evangelical literature.

I soon realized that a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads: The most conscientous student will be continually misconstruing the implications, even the meaning.

I specialize in murders of quiet, domestic interest.

I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.

I spent time in, like, criminal courts, and covering murder trials for papers.

Istanbul is inspiring because it has its own code of architecture, literature, poetry, music.

I started off at the high level, in the slick magazines, but they didn't use my name, they used house names. Anyway, then I went downhill to the pulps, then downhill further to the comics.

I started appreciating and valuing different things. Some things just became insufferable to me, and not just literature. I used to like horror movies and now I couldn't stand them.

I started as a print reporter. I’m a journalist and that’s what I do. My function is an anchorperson, but it’s in a journalism context, and gravitas and coats and ties and haircuts and all that sort of stuff, I’ll leave to others. My thing is just to do my job the best way I know how and as I say I’m very fortunate to be able to do it the way I want to do it.

I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.

I started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life.

I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years.

I start writing when I overcome my disgust with literature.

Is the babe young? When I behold it, it seems more venerable than the oldest man.

Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?

I studied English Literature. I wasn’t a very good student, but one thing I did get from it, while I was making films at the same time with the college film society, was that I started thinking about the narrative freedoms that authors had enjoyed for centuries and it seemed to me that filmmakers should enjoy those freedoms as well.

I studied literature design and fashion design.

I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own.

I study English literature but my friends are doing psychology and things like that. No one cares about acting there. It's not competitive and it's a nice environment for me.

I studied English literature; I took 2 independent religion classes, but I wasn't a religion major really.

I suffer from the curse of being multi-talented. There's no doubt about it. Politics and literature have gotten in the way of songwriting.

I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that - how to express this - you really must make the self.

I suspect there have been a number of conspiracies that never were described or leaked out. But I suspect none of the magnitude and sweep of Watergate.

It appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel.

It ain't a bad plan to keep still occasionally even when you know what you're talking about.

I take literature as a really serious human activity. It's not just a playful thing. It can be hilarious and wonderful and performative, but I think it's really serious.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.