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...

If arts and music, precious gifts in themselves, were akin to memory, literature was the self-knowing of the species; the human mind accumulated, a manifest of wisdom and knowledge, self-doubt and awareness, folly and foible,...

Never run upstairs when someone’s chasing you. Don’t try to quick-draw a man who already has his gun out. Never light a match in the dark in a strange building. Half of staying safe is...

I love and hate this place because it is full of words.

It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don’t have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables...

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

For this quiet, unprepossessing, passive man who has no garden in front of his subsidised flat, books are like flowers. He loves to line them up on the shelf in multicoloured rows: he watches over...

You can be a good painter if you study Cézanne’s vision. Whoever dares to copy Van Gogh falls inevitably into the hell of imitators. For this painter didn’t care about masterpieces, or even good paintings…...

Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.

There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I’ll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn...

There isn’t a lot of poverty literature in the young-adult world. And I don’t know why that is, but I think certainly I felt a gap.

In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro.(Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book.)

The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me–I have no others.

About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.

Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of...

Life itself has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become...

Trying to live up to yourself is the most trying thing.

Writers are engineers of human souls.

I place my fingers upon these keys typing 2,000 dreams per minute and naked of spirit dance forth my cosmic vortex upon this crucifix called language.

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put...

literature is a way in which we can learn to live deeper lives — husband with wife, parent with child, brother with sister, fellow member with fellow member. Most good authors are better than we...

It is difficult when reading the description of certain fictional characters not at the same time to imagine the real-life acquaintances who they most closely, if often unexpectedly, resemble.

Ağıtı asıl yönetenler ölünün kadın akrabalarıydı. Ağıtta eski geleneklerle kurulmuş, soğukkanlılıkla düşünülmüş bir düzen bulunduğu anlaşılıyordu. Akrabalığı uzakça olanlar tabutun yanında biraz duruyorlar, seslerini fazla yükseltmeden ağlayarak bir şeyler söylüyorlardı. Daha yakın olanlar eşikten girer...

Aptallar öğretmeyi, akıllılar ise öğrenmeyi sever.

Dakin: The more you read, though, the more you’ll see that literature is actually about losers.Scripps: No.Dakin: It’s consolation. All literature is consolation.

Writing, painting, singing–it cannot stop everything. Cannot halt death in its tracks. But perhaps it can make the pause between death’s footsteps sound and look and feel beautiful, can make the space of waiting a...

Perhaps somebody has alredy written it. But I want to write a story from the end till the very beginning.

Like Solzhenitsyn, I shall return, one bright dusk.

Every thought about death takes a moment of life away.

A hidden spark of the dream sleeps In the forest and waits In the celestial spheres of the brain.

He will understand when it is too late that it is easier to love.

The world is always open, Waiting to be discovered.

To understand possible means to understand impossible.

Get out, but don’t cause unneeded accidents.

In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.

Statesmen are grocers, ambitious clowns.

Sun is a hearthstone, a merry-go-round of extinguished hearthstones.

something genuine like a mark in a toilet, graced with guts and gutted with grace

Books can make a difference in dispelling prejudice and building community: not with role models and recipes, not with noble messages about the human family, but with enthralling stories that make us imagine the lives...

A boy trying out a man’s language.

The literature suggests that acupuncture may be helpful for certain kinds of pain for control of certain kinds of nausea,

If I may paraphrase Hobbes’s well-known aphorism, I would say that ‘books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.

We’ll shape it withour souls.”Desire illuminates the dark manuscriptof our skin with beetles and butterflies.After the lightning and rain has ceased,after the lightning and rain of lovemakinghas ceased, Selah will dive again into thesunflower-open river.

An author’s extraliterary utterance (blunt information), prenovel or postnovel, may infiltrate journalism; it cannot touch the novel itself. Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first,...

Thence it is possible to arrive by easy stages at the happy notion, not uncommon among ‘intellectuals’, that taste consists of distaste, and that the loftiest of pleasures is that of feeling displeased; and thus...

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?

Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be...

Ah youth, youth! That’s what happens when you go steeping your soul into Shakespeare