Literature Quotes - Page 152

A man of pleasure is a man of pains.

They only babble who practise not reflection

Wishing of all employments is the worst

Scholars of the Hebrew bible define something they call wisdom literature and I would say clearly the poetry of wisdom is something that comes with age or that might come with age which has to do with reflecting on experience.

There's always some place to go. You don't need workshops, you don't need friends necessarily, you can be befriended by literature itself.

A lot of my love of literature comes from Oz and Alice.

The ancients understood the regulation of power better than the regulation of liberty.

The Americans have always been food, sex, and spirit revivalists.

In some exquisite critical hints on "Eurythmy," Goethe remarks, "that the best composition in pictures is that which, observing the most delicate laws of harmony, so arranges the objects that they by their position tell their own story." And the rule thus applied to composition in painting applies no less to composition in literature.

The one overall structure in my plays is language

Violence is never a solution in my plays, just as ultimately violence is never a solution in human affairs.

Fifteen years ago I walked out of a production of one of my plays at the RSC because I decided it was a waste of time.

Now, drama is quite useful at helping us to understand what our position is and, conversely, we might then understand why our theatre is being destroyed

What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.

I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature.

I think that literature quite often emerges from areas where there has been a lack of articulation, like women's writing.

... clear thinking is not the characteristic which distinguishes our literature today. We are more and more caught up by the unintelligible. People like it. This argues an inability to think, or, almost as bad, a disinclination to think.

Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.

The want of an international Copy-Right Law, by rendering it nearly impossible to obtain anything from the booksellers in the wayof remuneration for literary labor, has had the effect of forcing many of our very best writers into the service of the Magazines and Reviews.

My evolution into becoming a photojournalist started with falling in love with literature when I was a teenager, falling in love with novels and imagining a life of being a storyteller.

We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.

Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.

England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.

The sort of poetry I seek only resides in objects Man can't touch - like England 's grass network of lanes 100 years ago, but today he can destroy them and only Lord Farrer keeps him from doing it.