Beneath beautiful appearances I search out ugly depths, and beneath ignoble surfaces I probe for the hidden mines of devotion and virtue. It’s a relatively benign mania, which enables you to see something new in...

How to explain the sheer tingling joy one experiences when two interesting, complex, and occasionally aggravating characters have at last settled their misunderstandings and will live happily ever after, no matter what travails life might...

I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken – and I’d...

Science has discovered that, like any work of literature, the human genome is a text in need of commentary, for what Eliot said of poetry is also true of DNA: ‘all meanings depend on the...

We work all our lives to be who we become. And, it’s who we become that determines what becomes of us.

In short, to enter the lists of literature is wilfully to expose yourself to the arrows of neglect, ridicule, envy, and disappointment. Whether you write well or ill, be assured that you will not escape...

The rich don’t have to kill to eat. They employ people, as they call it. The rich don’t do evil themselves. They pay. People do all they can to please them, and everybody’s happy.

You stand for what is right-for the patient and the staff.Pressures of work may down you,maybe bent but not broken.

Actually, I am a coward. I say only what is safe to say, and I criticise only what is permissable to criticise.

I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an art that can foresee the time...

And on top of that, my dad is a professor of literature so he’s very, very smart. So I was always thinking, ‘How I can aspire to be him?’ There was this intimidating aura growing...

Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.

He who does not know how to look back at where he came from will never get to his destination.

In French culture, the best way of buying time or getting off the hook entirely in a thorny personal situation is to claim that it’s complicated. The French did not invent love, but they did...

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

I’m interested in things women do that aren’t spoken about. Manto’s stories let me breathe. They make me feel like less of a monster.

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.

Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.

Looking back on my life, I sigh. The caprice of youth goes with the wind, I’ve no regrets.

I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.

Sail Forth- Steer for the deep waters only. Reckless O soul, exploring. I with thee and thou with me. For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared go. And we will risk the...

When people dis fantasy—mainstream readers and SF readers alike—they are almost always talking about one sub-genre of fantastic literature. They are talking about Tolkien, and Tolkien’s innumerable heirs. Call it ‘epic’, or ‘high’, or ‘genre’...

Of course, they were other things too. Sometimes they were even everything all together, but not fame, which was rooted in delusion and lies, if not ambition. Also, fame was reductive. Everything that ended in...

Read sometimes for the story, Bobby. Don’t be like the book-snobs who won’t do that. Read sometimes for the words – the language. Don’t be like the play-it-safers that won’t do that. But when you...

All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self…. What I have instead...

Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.

Literature is painting, architecture, and music.

I never thought I’d fall madly in love with literature.

You are not to take it, if you please, as the saying of an ignorant man, when I express my opinion that such a book as ROBINSON CRUSOE never was written, and never will be...

My theory on literature is an author who does not indulge in trashiness-writes about people you could introduce into your own home…he did not care to read a book or go to a play about...

The capital … shall form a fund, the interest of which shall be distributed annually as prizes to those persons who shall have rendered humanity the best services during the past year. … One-fifth to...

There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured.

This is surely the most significant of the elements that Tolkien brought to fantasy…. his arranged marriage between the Elder Edda and “The Wind in the Willows”–big Icelandic romance and small-scale, cozy English children’s book....

Bir insanın gençken kuvvetli karakteri yoksa, bir daha da olmaz.

Eğer insanoğlu hiç hastalanmazsa, isteklerine sınır tanımaz.

Anyone who says writing is easy isn’t doing it right.

The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy,...

letters”. Those letters are either delivered—they connect with an audience—or they don’t. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in...

Nature is an outcry, unpolished truth; the art—a euphemism—tamed wilderness.

When following God, Zero we never find.

Busy with the ugliness of the expensive success We forget the easiness of free beautyLying sad right around the corner, Only an instant removed, Unnoticed and squandered.

I enjoy it when the world smiles; the more smiles, the warmer I am.

There is nobody to wake up eternal seekers.

A star needs a star.

To accomplish the perfect perfection, a little imperfection helps.

Is it possible to write a poem or are these words just screams of outlaws exiled to the desert?

Your head is a lit chamber.

The world is a fairy tale; we are its guardians.

But it seems to me inevitable that any person who gives thoughtful and imaginative attention to literature must be awakened in his sensibilities, enlarged in his sympathies, sharpened in his critical faculties.

And literature frequently rises to heights that make it international.