Literature Quotes - Page 81

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

That is my major preoccupation, memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.

Pessimist: One who has been intimately acquainted with an Optimist.

We are not punished for our sins, but by them.

Trust funds can never be a substitute for a fund of trust.

Good is often the enemy of best.

Life is lived on levels and arrived at in stages.

There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.

Truth never was indebted to a lie

Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human

Most of what we call the classics of world literature suggest artifacts in a wax museum. We have to hire and pay professors to get them read and talked about.

...every literature, in its main lines, reflects the chief characteristics of the people for whom, and about whom, it is written.

Common sense is compelled to make its way without the enthusiasm of anyone.

But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else.

One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.

I am certainly an ought and not a must.

It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.

I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.

Literature is analysis after the event.

Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.

I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.

I have often noticed that ancestors never boast of the descendants who boast of ancestors. I would rather start a family than finish one. Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.

The art of newspaper paragraphing is to stroke a platitude until it purrs like an epigram.

When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.