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.

A good book is an event in my life.

Knowing, above all, that I would come looking, and find what he had left for me, all that remained of The Jungle Book in the pocket of his doctor’s coat, that folder-up, yellowed page torn...

All classes in proportion to their lack of travel and familiarity with foreign literature are bellicose, prejudiced against foreigners, fond of fighting as a cruel sport — in short, dog-like in their notions of foreign...

A lot of people have no idea that right now Y.A. (young adult). is the Garden of Eden of literature.

Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

It may be whispered to those uninitiated people who are anxious to know the habits and make the acquaintance of men of letters, that there are no race of people who talk about books, or,...

Interestingly, this speech by Prospero does not contrast the unreality of the stage with the solid, flesh-and-blood existence of real men and women. On the contrary, it seizes on the flimsiness of dramatic characters as...

If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.

Perhaps the truth is that heavy literature blooms in extremes of temperature.

The Cool Stuff Theory of Literature is as follows: All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about...

Some have speculated that the way [Albert] Camus died made his theories on absurdity a self-fulfilling prophecy. Others would say it was the triumphant meaningful way he lived that allowed him to rise heroically above...

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.

Each of us, deep down, believes that the whole world issues from his own precious body, like images projected from a tiny slide onto an earth-sized screen. And then, deeper down, each of us knows...

One bright day in the last week of February, I was walking in the park, enjoying the threefold luxury of solitude, a book, and pleasant weather.

Sopa yemiş köpeğe kırbacı bir kere gösterin yeter!

Onlar asla ölmemek için ne yaygara koparmışlar, ne dövüşmüşler ne de kendilerini övmüşlerdi. Ölümü soğukkanlılıkla kabul etmişlerdi. Güvensizlik duygusundan uzak olarak yavaş yavaş hazırlanmış ve iyi bir zamanda kısrağı, tayı, ev dokuması mantoyu, çizmeleri kimlerin...

I think of literature – she wrote – as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but cannot possibly reach. And I have started too late. I will never catch...

She’s right. We would compose poems about love and tell stories that have been heard in some form before. But it would be our first time feeling and telling.

Personally I know only one person who wrote about utopia. Afterwards he was executed. I suppose it’s not my genre.

The ambition of much of today’s literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.

If birth is a manifestation of life, death is another.

Fly without wings; Dream with open eyes; See in darkness.

One hand I extend into myself, the other toward others.

You are not what you are; You are darkness Looking for light within.

When I want to be reminded of stupidity, especially my own, I turn on the TV.

To cut and tighten sentences is the secret of mastery.

They blossomed, they did not talk about blossoming.

We like to admit to only that which already glows, although it is nobler to support brightness before it glows, not afterwards.

Sunbathe from within.

…there are only two things that really matter in life. Literature and love.

With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.

what is the significance of the Misfit’s hat?” I said it was to cover his head; and after that he left me alone. Anyway, that’s what’s happening to the teaching of literature.

Literature deals with morality but does not necessarily, does not, qua literature, help you to be more moral, either by precept or example. It makes you more aware. Which is to say that it makes...

A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually...

The pretentiousness of literature really annoys me; the way a writer is held as this sort of magical person to be revered on the stage. Everything I do on tour is to try and destroy...

If a novel’s salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.

There is nothing in the world which an artist cannot recreate into something poetic, ennobling. And why do we read these things? They are not facts, they do not improve our business skills, our techniques...

Writing is about taking everyday observations, things which people see almost every day of their lives, and yet bringing it to their attention for the very first time.

..the writer’s obsession – the desire to know and communicate, or, rather, to know everything so as to communicate with the greatest degree of precision.

I ask of literature precisely those things of which I feel the lack in my own life.

I think of science fiction as being part of the great river of imaginative fiction that has flowed through English literature, probably for 400 or 500 years, well predating modern science.

The fairy tale belongs to the poor…I know of no fairy tale which upholds the tyrant, or takes the part of the strong against the weak. A fascist fairy tale is an absurdity.

Una mujer es como la buena literatura: al alcance de todos, pero incomprensible para los estúpidos.

With the windows in his top of the range Audi firmly in place we slowly baked ourselves and chatted over why my hatred of golf was wrong, what made a good antihero and why Paul...

The idea of a successful novel was something that was reviewed in the Observer and then sank without trace. Literature wasn’t a happening thing in those days. Music and fringe theatre and television playwriting were...