Literature Quotes - Page 116

It’s all right to hesitate if you then go ahead.

I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.

Early Islam was a time of great creativity. Scholars excelled in sciences and literature.

We're surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.

It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else’s shoes and understand the other’s different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere of literature only one aspect of individuals is revealed. But if you understand their different dimensions you cannot easily murder them.

It is my sincere hope that Christopher Bryson's apparently thorough and comprehensive perusal of the scientific literature on the biological actions of fluoride and the ensuing debates through the years will receive the attention it deserves and that its implications will be seriously considered.

There is nothing like becoming a mom to fill you with fear.

As somebody who's been writing about this subject for getting on twenty years now, it's astonishing how the climate has changed in the last five years.

I enjoy the Web site a lot and I like being able to talk to my readers. I've always had a very close relationship with them.

The most decisive actions of life are most often unconsidered actions.

The writers who have been serious about recreating American literature have always been far and few between. What we do have at the end of the 20th century that we didn't have at the beginning, at that time of the Lost Generation of rich white boys, is a mixture. We're now getting gay writers of color, let's say, and women of color being published. This is unprecedented.

The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a lifebelt, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet be fully alive.

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?

Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society . . . loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.

The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.

You can say that literature is about topics like love, death, and all that, but I think there is only one topic that applies to all literature and that is belonging.

When literature is discovered, a revelation occurs: the joyful, exultant knowledge that anything can happen.

Don't you know this, that words are doctors to a diseased temperment?

For hostile word let hostile word be paid.

When I was a worker I busied myself with socialist or, if you like, marxist literature.

You can believe in originals only if you just don't know their context within literature. Certainly I believe in originality, but it lies with the teller, not the tale.

Literature, taken in all its bearings, forms the grand line of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms.

Literature tells very little to those who understand it.

Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary.

All the walks of literature are infested with mendicants for fame, who attempt to excite our interest by exhibiting all the distortions of their intellects and stripping the covering from all the putrid sores of their feelings.