607 quotes found
“You are not to take it, if you please, as the saying of an ignorant man, when I express my opinion that such a book as ROBINSON CRUSOE never was written, and never will be written again. I have tri...”
“What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And -- though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fal...”
“Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason and I want to say, No, it doesnt.”
“A novel works it's magic by putting a reader inside another person's life. The pace is as slow as life. It's as detailed as life. It requires you, the reader, to fill in an outline of words with vi...”
“Speech is the body part of thinking, the voice of the mind. Writing is the blood and mind mixing to speak through the fingers, through the hands.”
“The text contains no literary criticism. I wanted to describe books, not to be clever at their expense.”
“A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he's capable of. Noveli...”
“In the course of time, Michael Strogoff reached a high station in the Empire. But it is not the history of his success, but the history of his trials, which deserves to be related.”
“What does literature do better than anything else? It provides a detailed representation of the inner experience of being alive in a given time and place.”
“Not thou alone, but all humanity doth in its progress fable emulate. Whence came thy rocket-ships and submarine if not from Nautilus, from Cavorite? Your trustiest companions since the cave, we app...”
“Critical thinking does seem a superior sort of thinking because it seems as though the critic is actually going beyond the scope of what is being criticized in order to criticize it. That is only r...”
“Since the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart, and a host of others have shown that this religious dimension can be experienced and communicated apart from any religious context. But that i...”
“Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place. That was its role in the world, I'd started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn't matter and insp...”
“It began in mystery and it will end in mystery, but what a rare and beautiful country lies in between.”
“Hindustan had become free. Pakistan had become independent soon after its inception but man was still slave in both these countries -- slave of prejudice slave of religious fanaticism slave of ba...”
“Week before last I went to Wesleyan and read A Good Man Is Hard to Find. After it I went to one of the classes where I was asked questions. There were a couple of young teachers there and one of th...”
“If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.”
“Is there just one single love in a lifetime? Are all our lovers from the first to the last, including the most fleeting part of that unique love, and is each of them merely an expression of it, a...”
“I just can't get with this idea that literature is a 12-step program. If someone wants to read a book to see good people get rewarded and the bad people get punished, essentially what they want is ...”
“Literature suffers because writers give their books to colleagues who will then write glowing reviews or saccharine introductions.”
