Literature Quotes - Page 119

In the game of love, the losers are more celebrated than the winners.

Office politics are bloody-minded, but weak on content.

Women encourage men to be childish, then scold them.

I have learned to keep to myself how exceptional I am.

The educated do not share a common body of information, but a common state of mind.

I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.

I couldn't imagine any other way of living, outside of books, outside my work. Which doesn't mean I am not interested in other things, of course - I am interested in many things. But the center, the crux, is always literature.

I don't accept the idea that literature can be just entertainment and that there is no consequences of literature in the real world.

I don't think it's by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets.

I hadn't planned on going to law school. I wanted to study 19th-century Russian literature.

My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.

A critic at best is a waiter at the great table of literature.

To me the truth comes first and then the literature. We in China are dealing with a dictatorial system and we writers have to take a stance on it.

Two years ago I was on the train from Berlin to Frankfurt when I heard that the Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded to my close friend, the writer Liu Xiaobo, who is imprisoned in China. To me it was confirmation that universal values and a moral code do exist, and that the point of the Nobel Prize is to encourage writers to stand up for this moral code. Last Thursday I was once again on the train from Berlin to Frankfurt when I heard that the Nobel Prize for Literature had gone to Mo Yan. He is a state poet. I am utterly bewildered. Do these universal values not exist after all?

If one cannot get along without a mirror, even in shaving oneself, how can one reconstruct oneself or one's life, without seeing oneself in the "mirror" of literature?

It's not a good thing to be friends with people you're covering. There's just no point in doing it. It's tempting, but they're not going to consider you their friend anyway. They just know that you're somebody that can do something for them.

It's what a fellow thinks he knows that hurts him.

The frontiers we broke into in the '60s are still largely unexplored.

Fantasy is the oldest form of literature and science fiction is just a new twist on it.

The hope in literature is that we are allowed to be imperfect, to write of our imperfection, without being overly critiqued for being unlikeable.

The history of imitation of the older literature, particularly abroad, has among other advantages this one, that the important concepts of unintentional parody and passive wit can be deduced from it most easily and comprehensively.

Whoever could properly characterize Goethe's Meister would have actually expressed what is the timely trend in literature. He would be able, as far as literary criticism is concerned, to rest.

Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.

If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry.

A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.