What are we doing out there in the world?

We do literature a real disservice if we reduce it to knowledge or to use, to a problem to be solved. If literature solves problems, it does so by its own inexhaustibility, and by its...

I think imagination is at the heart of everything we do. Scientific discoveries couldn’t have happened without imagination. Art, music, and literature couldn’t exist without imagination. And so anything that strengthens imagination, and reading certainly...

I never want you to deny anything about yourself because you have grown up thinking it’s unacceptable or inconvenient for the people around you.

If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.

This was a crime of passion, but unlike most crimes of passion, it had been meticulously and diabolically well-planned.

This is what Laura loved about literature. You could see things in it that perhaps weren’t there, but might be. And even that didn’t matter if, in the end, readers needed something to be there....

The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to...

I went to work, but the mood of the book would not die; it lingered, coloring everything I saw, heard, did. I now felt that I knew what the white man were feeling. Merely because...

These two oo in “book” are like the two eyes of a reader who fell in love with a story.

I should point out, creating one’s own style, as much as is required to illustrate one of the aspects, the golden seam of language, involves beginning again at once, in a different manner, adopting the...

We all R failures that’s why V need #CHILDREN to fulfill D needs of #Society,#Nation,#Worlds , so that we can live the same old selfish way

That’s why I’ve just gone on … collecting this particular kind of stuff – what you might call riff-raff. There’s not a book here, Lawford, that hasn’t at least a glimmer of the real thing...

And adab towards language means the recognition and acknowledgement of the rightful and proper place of every word in a written or uttered sentence so as not to produce a dissonance in meaning, sound and...

A person could be immensely happy reading only him or the writers he loved. But that would be too easy.

Literature, I have always thought, is in most places and companies a singularly dull and uninteresting thing to talk about, but one may, as a rule, hate literary conversation, and yet at the right moment,...

In general, when a novel manipulates its material to conform to the pieties of the day, or alternatively to attack those pieties for no other reason than the visibility such an attack will generate, when...

Don’t for God’s sake speak as saint to sinner, but as you yourself to me myself – poor me!

O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!–Hamlet (I, v, 106)

But re-reading Voss also demonstrates again that although White wasn’t ‘a nice man’, and indeed was—perhaps rightly—scathingly dismissive of my and other Australian writers’ work and origins unless they were his friends, he was a...

I am no longer a writer. Just an emotion. An emotion that is unable to stay within its own body, and is therefore, trying to make its way into yours.

Here’s what I mean by the miracle of language. When you’re falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader’s heart and...

Where they (modern books) are true they will give us truths we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is...

Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common...

Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist.

1) Wir haben lang genug geliebt…2) Wir Wollen endlich hassen!3) Wir haben lang genug gehasst4) Wir wollen endlich lieben!1) Yeterince sevdik.2) Artık nefret etmek istiyoruz.3) Yeterince nefret ettik.4) Artık sevmek istiyoruz.

Aşk; hayatın tümü demek değildir.

If the word doesn’t exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn’t exist.

Re-vision–the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction–is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival....

I am drawn mostly, insistently to the human voice. How powerful and necessary the solo voice, the experience of being someone, something else for a little while. This is and will remain literature’s killer app,...

When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine’s Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was,...

Cosmos is God, who whispered the syllable of life.

There is something perfect to be found in the imperfect: the law keeps balance through the juxtaposition of beauty, which gains perfection through nurtured imperfection.

Gore Vidal, for instance, once languidly told me that one should never miss a chance either to have sex or to appear on television. My efforts to live up to this maxim have mainly resulted...

Will the day tell its secret Before it disappears, Becomes timeless night.

Good is not always good.

He tries to find the exit from himself but there is no door.

If what we think of ourselves were true, the planet would overflow with geniuses.

His Highness was always confident in his statements, especially about what he viewed for the first time.

Life is only a flicker of melted ice.

Stranger, pause and look;From the dust of agesLift this little book,Turn the tattered pages,Read me, do not let me die!Search the fading letters findingSteadfast in the broken bindingAll that once was I!

Amazing, really, to think of what a man could achieve with the simple ability to put pen to paper and spin a decent yarn.

My job is unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling, which is literature. Since I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else, my...

Love, it is said, is blind, but love is not blind. It is an extra eye, which shows us what is most worthy of regard. To see the best is to see most clearly, and...

In a word, literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or...

Literature is love. I think it went like this: drawings in the cave, sounds in the cave, songs in the cave, songs about us. Later, stories about us. Part of what we always did was...

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or, rather:that man is called ‘I’ and you know nothing else about him, just as this station is called only...

The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why...