Literature Quotes - Page 138

If I didn't see its place in the Saga when I planned it, I probably wouldn't write it at all.

Everything I write is designed to be milked to the last drop of revenue.

I really wouldn't call a lot of what's online "literature" since that word, to me, refers to a sub-genre of writing that belongs to the heavy-hitters, the canonical writers, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and even Toni Morrison, George Saunders, Thomas Bernhard, Sebald, Borges, DFW, e.g.

A critic is a lug-worm in the liver of literature.

But this is neither here nor there why do I mention it? Ask my pen, it governs me, I govern not it.

Men tire themselves in the pursuit of sleep.

A man convinced against his will is not convinced.

I personally was driven to be an actor for the love of telling a story. It was very closely linked to being a reader as a kid and being transported by literature and art. It had nothing - zero - to do with anything resembling fame.

If people would write exactly what I wanted to read I wouldn't feel so compelled to write myself

I'm more influenced by my own interests than anyone else's. Writers have to entertain themselves, or they can't entertain anyone else

All literature is written by the old to teach the young how to express themselves so that they in turn may write literature to teach the old how to express themselves. All literature is written by mentally precocious adolescents and by mentally precocious senescents.

People like to complain about the state of contemporary literature, but I can only assume they don't read it very widely.

There's nothing political about American literature.

Perhaps there is an idea among Japanese students that one general difference between Japanese and Western poetry is that the former cultivates short forms and the latter longer ones, gut this is only in part true.

It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.

A proof of really great art is that it is generally true - it seldom falls into the misapprehensions to which minor art is liable.

As a result, the highly civilized man can endure incomparably more than the savage, whether of moral or physical strain. Being better able to control himself under all circumstances, he has a great advantage over the savage.

But what is after all the happiness of mere power? There is a greater happiness possible than to be lord of heaven and earth; that is the happiness of being truly loved.

It has been wisely observed by the greatest of modern thinkers that mankind has progressed more rapidly in every other respect than in morality.

Everything is possible for the writer. There isn’t anything anyone can tell you that you can’t do, and there is no such thing as "getting away with" anything. There’s no one to tell you what you can or can’t do. You’re only limited by the fences you allow yourself to build around yourself, for whatever reason, including fidelity to some idea about literature someone else imposed upon you some time long ago or five minutes ago.

Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score.

Literature is by definition opinionated. It is bound to provoke the arguments in many quarters, not excluding the hometown or even the family of the author.

And what is literature, Rabo," he said, "but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the universe but a few molecules who have the disease called 'thought'.

And the most important thing you can do is learn to edit yourself. And then go back and rewrite.

Unless you're doing a feature piece, which is going to be longer, and you have more time to get into stuff.