In employing the long sentence the inexperienced writer should not strain after the heavy, ponderous type. Johnson and Carlyle used such a type, but remember, an ordinary mortal cannot wield the sledge hammer of a...

Literature always anticipates life. It doesn’t copy it but moulds it to it’s purpose.

Maybe at the very bottom of it… I really don’t like God. You know, it’s silly to say I don’t like God because I don’t believe in God, but in the same sense that I...

There used to be a rubbish heap under the great tree in Dhoby Ghaut with a sarabat stall parked next to it. It was a low, sprawling rubbish heap made up of the usual things—refuse...

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful...

Possible impossibility emerges From an impossible possibility, Or possibly, impossible possibility Blooms from the impossibly possible impossibility.

yo soy mi propio ángel y mi único demonio.

There are some people about whom it is difficult to say anything which would describe them immediately and fully in their most typical and characteristic aspects; these are the people who are usually called “ordinary”...

There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.

I can Control F to find words and phrases lost in a sea of literature, but why can’t I Control F to find one object among a hoarder’s clutter?

…but don’t tell me I’m not sensitive to beauty. That’s my Achilles’ heel, and don’t you forget it. To me, everything is beautiful. Show me a pink sunset and I’m limp, by God…

Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to the simple search...

Beneath beautiful appearances I search out ugly depths, and beneath ignoble surfaces I probe for the hidden mines of devotion and virtue. It’s a relatively benign mania, which enables you to see something new in...

How to explain the sheer tingling joy one experiences when two interesting, complex, and occasionally aggravating characters have at last settled their misunderstandings and will live happily ever after, no matter what travails life might...

I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken – and I’d...

Science has discovered that, like any work of literature, the human genome is a text in need of commentary, for what Eliot said of poetry is also true of DNA: ‘all meanings depend on the...

We work all our lives to be who we become. And, it’s who we become that determines what becomes of us.

In short, to enter the lists of literature is wilfully to expose yourself to the arrows of neglect, ridicule, envy, and disappointment. Whether you write well or ill, be assured that you will not escape...

The rich don’t have to kill to eat. They employ people, as they call it. The rich don’t do evil themselves. They pay. People do all they can to please them, and everybody’s happy.

You stand for what is right-for the patient and the staff.Pressures of work may down you,maybe bent but not broken.

Actually, I am a coward. I say only what is safe to say, and I criticise only what is permissable to criticise.

I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an art that can foresee the time...

And on top of that, my dad is a professor of literature so he’s very, very smart. So I was always thinking, ‘How I can aspire to be him?’ There was this intimidating aura growing...

Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.

He who does not know how to look back at where he came from will never get to his destination.

In French culture, the best way of buying time or getting off the hook entirely in a thorny personal situation is to claim that it’s complicated. The French did not invent love, but they did...

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

I’m interested in things women do that aren’t spoken about. Manto’s stories let me breathe. They make me feel like less of a monster.

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.

Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.

Looking back on my life, I sigh. The caprice of youth goes with the wind, I’ve no regrets.

I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.

Sail Forth- Steer for the deep waters only. Reckless O soul, exploring. I with thee and thou with me. For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared go. And we will risk the...

When people dis fantasy—mainstream readers and SF readers alike—they are almost always talking about one sub-genre of fantastic literature. They are talking about Tolkien, and Tolkien’s innumerable heirs. Call it ‘epic’, or ‘high’, or ‘genre’...

Of course, they were other things too. Sometimes they were even everything all together, but not fame, which was rooted in delusion and lies, if not ambition. Also, fame was reductive. Everything that ended in...

Read sometimes for the story, Bobby. Don’t be like the book-snobs who won’t do that. Read sometimes for the words – the language. Don’t be like the play-it-safers that won’t do that. But when you...

All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self…. What I have instead...

Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.

Literature is painting, architecture, and music.

I never thought I’d fall madly in love with literature.

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated...

Literature is air, and I’m suffocating in mediocrity.

O love, O fire! once he drewWith one long kiss my whole soul throughMy lips, as sunlight drinketh dew.

I looked into the literature on this,” said Nightingale, “and it wasn’t very helpful.””There’s a literature about this?””You’d be amazed, Constable, about what there’s a literature on.

In literature, too, we admire prose in which a small and astutely arranged set of words has been constructed to carry a large consignment of ideas. ‘We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes...

Tanrı’ya karşı olduğumu sanma, dedi. Tanrı’ya inancım tamdır. Yalnız cennet ve cehenneme inanmıyorum işte. İnsanları aptal yerine koyup onları öbür dünyada cennete, ya da cehenneme gideceklerini söylemek bence saçmalığın en büyüğü.

Özgürlük, özgürlüğü için her gün mücadele edenin hakkıdır.

Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent...

Sence and Sensibility, for instance, came out in three separate volumes, as did Pride and Prejudice (so the next time you read one of the ubiquitous time-travel Austen adaptations and somebody picks up a single-volume...

Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?” asked Mrs. Dodypol. “It depends,” says I, “how much you used the dictionary before you read it.