Literature matters because it is how humanity, with all its losses and joys, can become a work of art.

Het was een vergissing vanwege de juf, te denken dat alleen de dingen die in de boeken staan interessant zijn. Ook deze, die er nog niet in staan, zijn merkwaardig.

I am about tribal feminine power. As a leader, I may stumble but my essence lives to the future– of my people, of my literature, of my art. And when a tribesman turn against its...

The first prerequisite for fine literature is that the writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must struggle with to...

Und ehe ich mich’s versah, da war’s um mich geschehen. Ich war glücklich – wohl zum ersten Mal in meinem Leben. Ein extremes, ein unheimliches Gefühl hatte mich befallen und überwältigt. Ich war verliebt. Halb...

Mag sein, daß für manche die Literatur die angenehmste Art ist, das Leben zu ignorieren, wie Fernando Pessoa einmal geschrieben hat.

A stubborn refusal of the conditions of 20th Century ‘reality’, surrealism has denied intransigently and consistently that modern man can live without a sense of wonder at the world that was once embodied in myth....

Your passions don’t have to connect to one another and no one needs to sign off on them. Passion isn’t logical… it’s only the fuel which keeps our souls alive. Let it be that simple.

Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.

There is only one motive for writing a novel: to be published and read. To me there is no distinction between the mystery novel and the novel, only between good books and bad books. A...

For this decision, too, he had submitted to the overwhelming force of Sharon’s personality, whose longings and needs seemed inalienable rights, whereas Marcus’s were merely whims.

No hay duda, la aparición de un determinado asunto como objeto de recreación artística siempre está en relación estrecha con su presencia en las distintas esferas de la vida social.

John Paul Sartre became a hero in literature, philosophy, sociology and political science even though his popularity largely depended on his politics, and he was wrong on the most important issues of his time, championing...

I regained my soul through literature after those times I’d lost it to wild-eyed gypsy girls on the European streets.

Writers more interested in literature than the truth ensure that they never come out with either thing — one reason that the word literature today sounds so fake, as if you were to insist on saying cuisine...

It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too,...

Analysis goes a step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; that each of them is...

A group of ten prisoners from Dachau, I was with them, we hid in the forest to wait for the Americans. The Germans had already left everything behind. We had food but no weapons. For...

I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time.

Stories don’t teach us to be good; it isn’t as simple as that. They show us what it feels like to be good, or to be bad. They show us people like ourselves doing right...

She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose.

In my early teens, I heard about Naked Lunch and its mutating typewriters and talking cockroaches. While I would hardly classify its dystopic vision as erotica now, at the time, Naked Lunch was my first...

I will not mention the name (and what bits of it I happen to give here appear in decorous disguise) of that man, that Franco-Hungarian writer… I would rather not dwell upon him at all,...

He began to read at haphazard. He entered upon each system with a little thrill of excitement, expecting to find in each some guide by which he could rule his conduct; he felt himself like...

Literature is the aesthetic exploitation of language

But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see…...

The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves.

Give at least fifteen minutes everyday to reading. Sometimes, we spend a lot of time watching television – surfing through channels; not really watching anything in particular. Fifteen minutes out of that time is not...

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly in hand before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.

Hayat karışık, öyle karışıktı ki… Nereye dönerseniz dönün aynı karışıklık vardı.

Literature is a cake with many toys baked inside-and even if you find them all, if you don’t enjoy the path that leads you to them, it will be a hollow accomplishment. There was a...

In some literature, I’ve read, weather is used as a metaphor. The darker and stormier the weather outside the more diabolical the deeds done. When the clouds roll away, however, the rain has washed away...

Poirot, watching him, felt suddenly a doubt–an uncomfortable twinge. Was there, here, something that he had missed? Some richness of the spirit? Sadness crept over him. Yes, he should have become acquainted with the classics....

The art teacher’s scarlet book was called Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. ‘As the title suggests,’ Mr Dunwoody saw the book’d caught my attention, ‘it’s about the history of opticians. What are you...

To come to nothing through something is the way to outside from both sides.

Perfection seems sterile; it is final, no mystery in it; it’s a product of an assembly line.

Pretense cannot sustain blind power.

Long ago an uncalled rain fell and a called-upon God stayed equally distant.

I visited many places, Some of them quite Exotic and far away, But I always returned to myself.

To say more while saying less is the secret of being simple.

MarginaliaSometimes the notes are ferocious,skirmishes against the authorraging along the borders of every pagein tiny black script.If I could just get my hands on you,Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,they seem to say,I would bolt the...

The game itself is bigger than the winning.

Arrival in the world is really a departure and that, which we call departure, is only a return.

While art thrives on the blazing colours of scandal, literature blossoms on the dark soil of tragedy.

In classrooms and living rooms across the globe, an agnostic or an atheist may be heard to strenuously argue, ‘But the Bible is just a book.’ Similar arguments may be raised against other holy books....

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.

Hundreds of thousands of people live in my library. Some are real, others are fictional. The real ones are the so-called imaginary characters in works of literature, the fictional ones are their authors. We know...

I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

I’m sorry,’ she said to each of the dead as she unzipped and unfastened their things, ‘I’m sorry Courtney.I’m sorry Marcus. I’m sorry Rachel.I’m sorry Jon. I’m sorry I’m alive and you’re dead. I’m sorry...

I awoke one morning to find myself famous.