But the required survey of English literature troubled and disquieted him in a way nothing had ever done before.

Any connoisseur knows you’ve got to be drunk to really enjoy a good romance.

Hai Si Jebat, berpada-padalah engkau membunuh orang beribu-ribu ini, kerana engkau pun akan mati – Laksamana Hang Tuah.

La politique au milieu des intérêts d’imagination, c’est un coup de pistolet au milieu d’un concert.

The parrot had a range of phrases. His own name (‘Niko, Niko’), the name of his original owner and now ‘Stavros’. Occasionally he would also say ‘Panagia mou’, which could be an expression of piety...

People perish. Books are immortal.

I thought I’d been condescended to as an Indian – that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing young adult literature.

Younger than Morini and Pelletier, Espinoza studied Spanish literature, not German literature, at least for the first two years of his university career, among other sad reasons because he dreamed of being a writer.

In learning a language, when from mere words we reach the laws of words, we have gained a great deal. But if we stop at that point and concern ourselves only with the marvels of...

Basically, being alive means keeping yourself ready for the sky to fall in on you at any time. If you start from the assumption that existence is only an ordeal, a test we have to...

Is it a coincidence that stories from the private life became more popular just as the grand hope for public redemption through revolution was beginning to sour? I witnessed a similar shift in taste in...

The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.

The one thing is fiction in a novel and the other thing is reality. With fiction you don’t make a fuss – you can ‘beat it’ and there’s never enough. At least in my opinion...

Literature is always personal, always one man’s vision of the world, one man’s experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.

Few pleasures, for the true reader, rival the pleasure of browsing unhurriedly among books: old books, new books, library books, other people’s books, one’s own books – it does not matter whose or where. Simply...

The African continent has so many stories to tell, it’s about time they are told, by them – not us.

Life happened because I turned the pages.

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

Mal denen şeye kendi varlığımız ya da halkın varlığı gibi tuhaf bir ad koymuşuz. Üstelik varlığını kaybetmek insanlar arasında ayıp ve budalalık sayılmış.

Büyükanne daima “Kızağını yazdan, arabanı kıştan hazırla” derdi.

Words are a puzzle; put them together the right way and you get something beautiful.

Within a week I walked the streets of Tel-Aviv, I wandered around Budapest and found myself admiring the Architecture of Paris. That’s the power of great literature.

What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.

In the essence of truth lies deceit.

The world is God’s salvation.

Serious affairs and history are carefully laid snares for the uninformed.

The enduring rapture with magic and fable has always struck me as latently childish and somehow sexless (and thus also related to childlessness).

When magic through nerves and reason passes, Imagination, force, and passion will thunder. The portrait of the world is changed.

To go against the grain is the secret of bravery.

Trying too hard to be too good, even when trying to be bad, is too good for the bad, too bad for the good.

Our desire to say more grows bigger and what to say about it, except that saying is not always about saying, growing is not always about growing.

If you could have walked on the planet before humans lived here, maybe the Ivory Coast would have seemed more beautiful than La Côte d’Azur.

Existence is the end of endless eternity without a beginning or an end.

Go ahead and laugh at Detroit. Because you are laughing at yourself.

A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.

Adults…struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire...

Good literature boils down to two things: How interesting is the story you are telling, and how interesting is your telling.

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied...

Outside of the dreary rubbish that is churned out by god knows how many hacks of varying degrees of talent, the novel is, it seems to me, a very special and rarefied kind of literary...

The idea we came up with, well before we left, was something we coined Performance Literature. Excuse the use of that second word, because I realize it’s presumptuous. Also, excuse the first word, and the...

They passed, leaving a trail of foxfire shuffled up out of the wet leaves like stars plowed in a ship’s wake.

You never stopped thinking of yourself as a writer biding his time in the Department of Factual Verification. But between the job and the life there wasn’t much time left over for emotion recollected in...

Gerçeği gömmeniz boşuna, toprağın altında yol alıyor; bir gün, her yandan fışkıracak, öç bitkileri olarak açılacaktır.

There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands awayNor any Coursers like a Page Of prancing Poetry – This Traverse may the poorest takeWithout oppress of Toll – How frugal is the...

They were…no ordinary group, gathering together to kill an evening, to seek refuge from critical husbands and demanding children while idly discussing their new best-seller. They met because literature was their shared passion. Books were...

There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.

O rahibeleri bu yüzden sevmiştim. Anlıyordunuz, her seyden önce, onlar hiç bir zaman öyle şatafatlı yerlerde yemek yemezlerdi. Onların hiç bir zaman şatafatlı bir yerde yemeğe gitmediklerini düşününce felaket üzüldüm.

The literary text seems like “a fortified medieval town –foreigners and outsiders are repelled, or allowed in only after rigorous checks, but within all is bustling life; exchange, mutual interdependence and influence are the rule.

The vast majority of us imagine ourselves as like literature people or math people. But the truth is that the massive processor known as the human brain is neither a literature organ or a math...

Il (Georges Perros) avait une voix sonore et lumineuse, un peu feutrée, qui remplissait parfaitement le volume des classes, comme elle aurait comblé un amphi, un thé tre, le champ de Mars, sans que jamais...