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...

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.

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...

yo soy mi propio ángel y mi único demonio.

You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following...

For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints.

What is literature, and why do I try to write about it? I don’t know. Likewise, I don’t know why I go on living, most of the time. But this not knowing is precisely what...

I do think that part of literature’s job is to comment on and participate in the social issues of the time.

A good story will always outlive the truth.

It didn’t help that I was never allowed to study anything remotely contemporary until the last year of university: there was never any sense of that leading to this. If anything, my education gave me...

He whom the gods love dies young.

The re-evaluation and rediscovery of minority art (including the cultural minority of women) is often conceived as a matter of remedying injustice and exclusiveness through doing justice to individual artists by allowing their work into...

Thus like a Captive in an Isle confin’d,Man walks at large, a Pris’ner of the Mind

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

When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do...

In our modern world, this elemental quality of storytelling is denied. We live today in a world in which everything has its place and function and nothing is left out of place. Storytelling is thus...

Recognize that you have been chosen to be alive, right now, at this exact moment in time and know that none of that is random. There is something about you, your past or your future...

Unless their use by readers bring them to life, books are indeed dead things.

Which is probably one of the reasons those of us who love contemporary fiction love it as we do. We’re alone with it. It arrives without references, without credentials we can trust. Givers of prizes...

When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfarthers of Blair and little Bush were scratching around in caves.

Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.

Allein die Literatur erlaubt uns, mit dem Geist eines Toten in Verbindung zu treten, auf direkte, umfassendere und tiefere Weise, als das selbst in einem Gespräch mit einem Freund möglich wäre – denn so tief...

All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.

An unfinished book. left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will and ruthless determination to tame it again.

[On Female Attraction to Men in Uniform] That male military persona feeds a subconscious, passive-aggressive female desire to dominate the warrior as he is perceived an iconic example of masculinity (particularly amongst traditionally warlike cultures)....

Books had taught me new ideas and had shown me ways of life that I would not have known about otherwise, and they offered a refuge when, like now, real life seemed too hard.

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

The literature [Nobel] laureate of this year has said that an author can do anything as long as his readers believe him.A scientist cannot do anything that is not checked and rechecked by scientists of...

Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons,...

Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered

And that is to say, of course, that you can “read” a culture without its literature, without the bother of gathering and holding its ideas, considering their genesis and evolution, and weighing them in the...

In this course I have tried to reveal the mechanism of those wonderful toys — literary masterpieces. I have tried to make of you good readers who read books not for the infantile purpose of...

And if I am not mistaken here is the secret of the greatness that was Spain. In Spain it is men that are the poems, the pictures and the buildings. Men are its philosophies. They...

Don’t you think our society is designed to kill in that way? Of course, you’ve surely heard about those tiny fish in the rivers of Brazil which attack the swimmer by the thousands, eat him...

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

FROG, n. A reptile with edible legs. The first mention of frogs in profane literature is in Homer’s narrative of the war between them and the mice. Skeptical persons have doubted Homer’s authorship of the...

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

The stories are not made, they are discovered.

Ebediyet çok uzundur.

Sang Ly, we are literature-our lives, our hopes, our desires, our despairs, our passions, our strengths, our weaknesses. Stories express our longing not only to make a difference today but to see what is possible...

There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D.H. Lawrence had known that. You needed love, but not the kind of love most people used and were used up by. Old D.H....

In your opinion, where do private and political life, personal history and History meet? You know the answer, Maya. You say it unhesitatingly – in art and literature.

Of course, that’s one of the dreams of modernist literature, whether realist or fantastic: that the more stories we tell each other about such tragedies, the fewer of them there will be. We’re still waiting...

There is no competition of sounds between a nightingale and a violin.

To enjoy and learn from what you read you must understand the meanings of the words a writer uses. You do yourself a grave disservice if you read around words you don’t know, or worse,...

I recreate myself; that is my only power.

Death swallows death.

Earth is the source of light.