Literature Quotes - Page 143

I think American literature is in a tedious place, horrible place. I can't even engage with it.

It is not sex by itself that interests me, but its particular role in American consciousness, and in my own life.

I don't fret over lost time - I can always use the situations in a novel.

Physical comfort has nothing to do with any other comfort.

When I went through the break-up, I really looked for some kind of music, or art or literature that could say, "I've been in the same situation." I couldn't find anything at the moment, and that made me really sad.

All media can muddy the mind. Language leads to literature. It also leads to dogma.

It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born?

When work resonates with a person, whether it is literature or film or music, then they want to know more about the artist. That's very natural.

I had huge ambition for literature. I don't see the point of doing anything if you don't have ambition for it.

I wanted to cause trouble, but I know now it stays with you.

I had relationships with men as well as women. I wasn't choosing; I didn't think I had to.

My characters are always on the outside; the spotlight's not on them. But they do get somewhere.

Many people feel their outer self isn't the whole self.

There are so many separate selves; no one who writes creatively hasn't felt that.

We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.

Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.

I like to think the price I paid by being open about my private life helped.

Whatever is powerful to you can be translated into something which will matter to somebody that you will never know.

The form [of literature] matters little to me, classical or not.

For forty years I was conscripted by the absolute, the neurosis. The absolute is gone. There remain countless tasks among which literature is in no way privileged.

I had realized in the meantime that action too has its difficulties, and that one can also be led to it by neurosis. We are not saved by politics any more than by literature.

I think it is a mistake to identify a movie according to its language, as if movies were literature.

Literature: proclaiming in front of everyone what one is careful to conceal from one's immediate circle

I have made as much out of myself as could be made of the stuff, and no man should require more.

Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world,” I said, “but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld *hope* their own world to be—it isn’t a mirror, it’s an aspiration.