Literature Quotes - Page 161

Literature belongs first and foremost to the language in which it is being written.

Literature exists inside the language. It's made of words.

The battlefield is first and foremost horrible stenches, not sights, not sounds, but stenches. They don't travel well into literature.

I'm not sure I'm happy with words such as "task" or "role" when they are attached to literature.

Literature is about telling stories.

Literature exists inside the language. It's made of words. It's not made of ideas and it's not made of concepts, of psychological analysis. It's made of words. In the same way in which music is made of notes and a painting is made of lines of colors, the matter of literature are words.

Literature is, in fact, the fruit of leisure.

Acquiring a repertoire in these days, when the vocal literature is so immense, so overwhelming, that the student with sense will devote all his energies to work and not imagine himself a martyr to art.

Real literature, like travel, is always a surprise.

As writers, the world is not about individual expression entirely because we are producing works of literature and getting them out into the world.

Much contemporary verse reads like failed short-short stories rather than failed poetry.

I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.

A perfect judge will read each word of wit with the same spirit that its author writ.

The better a novel is, in literary terms, the more you can't be faithful. The novel succeeds on terms exclusive to literature. A good film succeeds on terms exclusive to the cinema. That's why so many bad novels can become good movies.

Periods of rapid and fundamental change were never favourable for literature. Significant works, have nearly always and everywhere been created in periods of stability, be it good or bad.

Thus, literature, together with language, preserves and protects a nation's soul.

Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

Europe is a rapidly changing place, on every level. Immigration, post-communist transitions, the unification, steady presence of war and conflict, the inescapable challenges to the notion of national literature/culture-it all exerts pressure upon writers who must be aware of the transformational possibilities of the situation.

You can see the diversity that pieces in the anthology represent, and then the interconnections-obvious and less obvious-between various stories or between various modes of storytelling. Diversity generates need for conversation, conversation generates common interests, as well as differences. Literature, as a human project, is all about that.

Literature is always something - it is either story or poetry, ideally both. That is, you always know what it is and even if the interpretation is not available, the experience of language is.

It's not that war crimes stop as soon as a novel about them is published. Literature operates slowly, it is always inching toward bliss, never quite getting there.

In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.

I started appreciating and valuing different things. Some things just became insufferable to me, and not just literature. I used to like horror movies and now I couldn't stand them.

The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.

I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.