Literature Quotes - Page 111

The literature of women's lives is a tradition of escapees, women who have lived to tell the tale.

In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet

Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.

Well, I'm a light traveller. I chuck things away.

I don't care whether a book is a first edition or not. I'm not a bibliophile in that word's natural sense.

As countless as grains of sand by the sea are human passions, and they all differ; all of them, vile or lofty, begin by being under a man's control and then become his terrible masters. Blessed is he who has chosen the most lofty of passions: his immeasurable bliss grows and multiplies tenfold with every hour and minute, and he penetrates deeper and deeper into the infinite paradise of his soul.

One of the major principles is that Soviet literature must be inseverably linked with the policy of the Communist party

In many ways, it was much, much harder to get the first book contract. The hardest thing probably overall has been learning not to trust people, publicists and so forth, implicitly.

Winning Nobel imposed on me a lifestyle to which I am not used and which I would not have preferred.

I am practically in the employ of Mr. Nobel. I have to meet everyone he sends my way.

Without literature my life would be miserable.

Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it's a letdown, they won't buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.

Literature must spring from the deep and submerged humus of our life.

Literature is a microscope; it shows us the unseen!

I would describe myself as a writer and a student of media. If there's a central idea in media theory, it's to take media as form. It might grow out of philosophical aesthetics or the study of literature and visual art, but the various strands of media theory converge in treating all of those as subsets of the study of media as form.

Photography's about the surface, what's happening at the top of the sea. Literature's about all the stuff below.

To deaden yourself against any hurt is to deaden yourself also against the hurt of others.

There is much virtue in a window. It is to a human being as a frame is to a painting, as a proscenium to a play, as 'form' to literature. It strongly defines its content.

Sacrificing one's life on the altar of literature is in some ways like sacrificing a goat to some malicious spirit. It's not always a humane or necessary decision.

Imagine! It is the real power of a book--not what is on the page, but what happens when a reader takes the pages in, makes it part of himself. That is the definition of literature.

Humor does not rescue us from unhappiness, but enables us to move back from it a little.

Fail, and your friends feel superior. Succeed, and they feel resentful.

Logic and fact keep interfering with the easy flow of conversation.

Events are called inevitable only after they have occurred.

Well-behaved: he always speaks as if his mother might be listening.