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

You are…the embodimentof immediate good karma.The equalizer between bottomfeeders and the sanctimoniouscogs in the system.

Like works of literature, mathematical ideas help expand our circle of empathy, liberating us from the tyranny of a single, parochial point of view.

A literatura era o melhor brinquedo que se tinha inventado para gozar com as pessoas

I won’t stop writing until I am known as the Kurt Cobain of literature!

To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by...

Here we are in the century of information, that is to say the unformed. Every kind of literature will be journalistic, with a science for ballast.

You must be more gentle, dear, more sedate,’ Ellen told her daughter. ‘You must not interrupt gentlemen when they are speaking, even if you do think you know more about matters than they do. Gentlemen...

Literature is impossible, in exactly this sense: every new generation has so much ‘catching up’ to do that the real choice that presents itself soon is the following one: one either spends ones entire life...

Speech is the body part of thinking, the voice of the mind. Writing is the blood and mind mixing to speak through the fingers, through the hands.

Reading books is a way for you to communicate with and learn from the best thinkers that are writing today and that have ever lived.

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time… The wait is simply too long.

Aklına Şair Adam Mickiewicz’in heykeli gelince gözleri parladı.

The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us...

Atunci am înțeles că nimic nu durează în suflet, că cea mai verificată încredere poate fi anulată de un singur gest, că cele mai sincere posesiuni nu dovedesc niciodată nimic, căci și sinceritatea poate fi...

I would not have majored in English and gone on to teach literature had I not been able to construct a counterargument about the truthfulness of fiction; still, as writers turn away from the industrious...

Literature is one kind of aesthetic politics.

Mutlu olabilmek için her gün bir miktar edebiyatla ilgilenmem gerekiyor.

This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents–were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and...

They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction.’Poor Grendel’s had an accident,’ I whisper. ‘So may you all.

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of...

All writers are waiting for replies. That’s what I’ve learned. Maybe all human beings are

{…} It is hieroglyphic that will last, not stone heads. The future belongs to the word, not the image.(The mason Mutsose, in Achet-Aten).

En France, que de gens à longues oreilles : nes en littérature, lièvres en politique !

Lord Jim.” I have friends who’ve found themselves described in everything from science fiction to detective novels. This self-recognition through others is not simply a by-product of art — it’s the whole point.

The moon had been lighted and was hung in a treetop.

When I first stepped into literature twenty-five years ago, I wanted to work on behalf of the oppressed, the working masses, and it seemed to me, mistakenly, that I would not find them among the...

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very...

The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this...

Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.

The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author’s supervision swell gradually with the reader’s lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that...

This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone...

In my teens, I developed a passionate idolatry for a teacher of English literature. I wanted to do something that he would approve of more, so I thought I should be some sort of a...

It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world, and...

No encounter occured that day, and I was glad of it; I took out of my pocket a little Homer I had not opened since leaving Marseilles, reread three lines of the Odyssey, learned them...

There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book.

We read in slow, long motions, as if drifting in space, weightless. We read full of prejudice, malignantly. We read generously, making excuses for the text, filling gaps, mending faults. And sometimes, when the stars...

I finally returned to Iran in 1979, when I got my degree in English and American literature, and stayed for 18 years in the Islamic republic.

Gençken tecrüben yoktur, yaşlıyken de gücün.

Yirmi beş yaşındayken insanlar üzerine ne bilebiliriz ki?

Sir, I shall not defeat you – I shall transcend you.

I stress the expansion and elaboration of language. In simplifying it, reducing it, we reduce the power of our expression and our power to communicate. Standardization, the use of worn-out formulas, impedes communication because it...

Books and movies, they are not mere entertainment. They sustain me and help me cope with my real life.

Even if you are alone you wage war with yourself.

Hope without love is hopeless.