607 quotes found
“Sometimes two people have to fall apart, to realize how much they need to fall back together.”
“Good literature is one key to peace. When we stop reading each other, when we stop paying attention to each other's words and stories, we too easily oppose one another.”
“There is only one motive for writing a novel: to be published and read. To me there is no distinction between the mystery novel and the novel, only between good books and bad books. A good book tak...”
“For thy sweet love remembr'd such wealth bringsThat then, I scorn to change my state with kings.”
“What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to me. We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness.”
“The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in...”
“A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.”
“The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah ...”
“Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their pattern of sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses. Communication may be made in broken words, the business of life be c...”
“Personal experience is the basis of all real literature.”
“My theory on literature is an author who does not indulge in trashiness-writes about people you could introduce into your own home...he did not care to read a book or go to a play about people he w...”
“One gets wise by meeting people and meeting people through their literature.”
“He who writes to his beloved every day is not a lover, but a writer.”
“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent”
“For my part, I love to give myself up to the illusion of poetry. A hero of fiction that never existed is just as valuable to me as a hero of history that existed a thousand years ago.”
“Read for yourselves, read for the sake of your inspiration, for the sweet turmoil in your lovely head. But also read against yourselves, read for questioning and impotence, for despair and eruditio...”
“the glory of the protagonist is always paid for by a lot of secondary characters”
“something genuine like a mark in a toilet, graced with guts and gutted with grace”
“A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature.”
“No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six oclock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.”
