Literature Quotes - Page 27

Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!

Learning and literature have a way of outlasting the civilization that made them.

'Tis love that makes the world go round, my baby.

Cows are my passion. What I have ever sighed for has been to retreat to a Swiss farm, and live entirely surrounded by cows - and china.

Life is so unlike theory.

Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around.

The most gifted natures are perhaps also the most trembling.

Silence is the wit of fools.

Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen.

I thought I’d been condescended to as an Indian - that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing Y.A.

I think literature is best when it's voicing what we would prefer not to talk about.

Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.

Almost any poem has to be read twice, first for strangeness, second for clarity.

I accepted the interviews and encounters that had to be held with the media, but I would have preferred to work in peace.

The scientific observer of Nature is a kind of mystic seeker in the act of prayer.

One of the biggest problems in literature is the lack of subtlety.

For many, immaturity is an ideal, not a defect.

Imagination has rules, but we can only guess what they are.

In the literature of France Moliere occupies the same kind of position as Cervantes in that of Spain, Dante in that of Italy, and Shakespeare in that of England. His glory is more than national - it is universal.

Fanfiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don't do it for money. That's not what it's about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They're fans, but they're not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.

There is nothing which we receive with so much reluctance as advice.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

The narrative was too constricted; it was like a fetus strangling on its own umbilical cord.

If you start to think of your physical and moral condition, you usually find that you are sick.