Literature Quotes - Page 104

Seine et Danube was launched in 2003 with the help of Romanian authorities who had finally realized the necessity of promoting literature and Romanian culture in general. Along with focusing on the literature of the countries the Danube traversed (with an emphasis on Romania), we printed work that interested us from the banks of the Seine: French and French-Romanian authors like Cioran and Fondane. We dedicated our last edition to surrealism and Esthetic Onirisme.

Wine has lit up for me the pages of literature, and revealed in life romance lurking in the commonplace.

So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter.

But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work

I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.

In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act.

True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.

I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.

American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos.

The blood of Jesus Christ can cover a multitude of sins, it seems to me.

The possibility of divorce renders both marriage partners stricter in their observance of the duties they owe to each other. Divorces help to improve morals and to increase the population.

A fanatic is a nut who has something to believe in.

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

A politician's goal is always to manipulate public debate. I think there are some politicians with higher goals. But all of them get corrupted by power.

I've not seen in my lifetime any politician who is a heroic figure. The manipulation that all politicians use on one level or another is so transparent.

The only reason I would write a sequel is if I were struck by an idea that I felt to be equal to the original. Too many sequels diminish the original.

They may be a little more high brow than we are.

Even more important maybe, or equally more important at least, is they don't have to scrap for a living.

My favorite thing is still journalism. I'm almost 50. This has been my life ever since I was in college.

I often heard about his cases and I often sat in on his trials. In the late 1960s when I was growing up I wanted to be a crusader like him but I didn't want to wear a suit and commute.

I became paralyzed as an artist with writer's block.

I'm interested in themes that endure from generation to generation.

I get up at an unholy hour in the morning my work day is completed by the time the sun rises. I have a slightly bad back which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.

Allen Ginsberg was a world authority on the writing of William Blake, and had an incredible knowledge of classic literature and world politics.

Newspaper readership is declining like crazy. In fact, there's a good chance that nobody is reading my column.