Literature Quotes - Page 92

First of all, the novel should be a critique of the novels that have come before it in a language that broadens the audience of American literature. Second, it's really got to be invested in a number of what-if questions.

Managing bottom-up change is its own art.

Much of outcomes research is a systematic attempt to exploit what is known and make it better.

Organizations get invested into a particular product. And sometimes the best thing is to stop making that product, even though it's profitable, because it has optimized at a local peak.

But in a turbulent environment the change is so widespread that it just routes around any kind of central authority. So it is best to manage the bottom-up change rather than try to institute it from the top down.

It's generally much easier to kill an organization than to change it substantially.

The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.

I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not nationally known as being a literary family, though my mother and my mother's side of the family in general were interested in literature.

The '60s aren't over; they won't be over until the Fat Lady gets high.

What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer's life with the writing. I think that's something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now.

I don't really like to work with literary allusions very much. I never want to be in a position where I'm saying, "You've got to read a lot of other stuff" or "You've got to have had a good education in literature to fully appreciate what I'm doing."

He was always sort of a scrappy little kid wasn't he? A bit of a fighter?

All three networks have always had a morning show but now cable of course is taking some of that audience away and a variety of other things, probably the Internet as well.

I've always tried to stay true to my authentic self.

And they like being able to turn on the television day in and day out to see someone that they know and they feel comfortable with and trust hopefully and respect even.

Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.

...those of us who write for children are called, not to do something to a child, but be someone for a child.

I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.

I sailed through my childhood with a complete lack of any drama.

If I'm in danger then it's usually my fault and it's up to me to get myself out of it. I am not in it just to get an adrenalin rush. No way!

I was timid and frightened as a child. Yours truly did not shin up mountains or do any other kind of adventurous stuff.

It wasn't glamorous in my day. In the regions, reporters were seen as such low life that they didn't merit their name in the Radio Times. Now people are interested in being famous. I never gave it a thought.

Up until about 12 years ago we never, ever, wore flak jacket or helmets but now the nastiness has got worse.

Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.

Novels tend to end as the Paternoster begins: with the kingdom of God on earth.