Literature Quotes - Page 136

the truth is artistically fallacious.

I think there is something about coming to a city to work that puts you in touch with it in a different way.

I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.

Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged.

[On collectors of quotations:] How far our literature may in future suffer from these blighting swarms, will best be conceived by a glance at what they have already withered and blasted of the favourite productions of our most popular poets.

Women excel more in literary judgment than in literary production,--they are better critics than authors.

I loved everything. I read everything. Art and poetry and literature and trash and sci fi. I didn't know what I would become yet and I needed to read to figure it out.

I enjoyed teaching. I liked the students. Having to formulate my ideas about literature made them clearer. I did not particularly enjoy the more bureaucratic aspects of the job. However, if you are teaching fervently, your energy and time are used up at a great rate.

Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.

Literature is not only a mirror; it is a map, a geography of the mind.

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.

The central symbol for Canada-and this based on numerous instances of its occurrence in both English and French Canadian literature-is undoubtedly Survival, la Survivance.

I was kidnapped by literature at a young age and never wanted to be ransomed.

Whenever I write, I'm always thinking of the reader.

I am very interested in what has been called bad taste. I believe the fear of displaying a soi-disant bad taste stops us from venturing into special cultural zones.

Kafka truly illustrates the way the environment oppresses the individual. He shows how the unconscious controls our lives.

I write novels because there is something I don't understand in reality.

I didn't choose literature. Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side.

Hindu religious literature, indeed all religious literature, is full of illustrations to prove the truth.

I have no control, of course, over how I'm marketed. It's a sad thing, though, that so many people perceive literature to be gendered. The idea that some subjects are male and some are female is just preposterous to me. It's reductive and nonsensical, to separate writers and subjects and plots along gender lines. It's meaningless.

To write for children at all is an act of faith.

Only as we give the children the truth about life can we expect any improvement in it.

English dramatic literature is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare; and it is almost inevitable that an English reader should measure the value of other poetic drama by the standards which Shakespeare has already implanted in his mind.

There are lots of unlikable characters in literature. It doesn't mean they're not fascinating.

I'd studied English literature and American history, but the English literature, which I thought was going to be helpful to me in an immediate way, was the opposite. So I had to un-think a lot of things and move out of my own head, and I learned a lot. It was like graduate school, but an un-graduate school or an un-school.