We are all one. Everything is meaningless, and yet at the same time meaningful. Everything matters and doesn’t matter just as much,” Wisdom said and looked beyond time.(Nakoma, by Gala.J)

In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.

It’s not what you lift, it’s where you carry it.

Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.

Out of the corner of one eye, I could see my mother. Out of the corner of the other eye, I could see her shadow on the wall, cast there by the lamplight. It was...

When the owner of the pig arrived he found a scrawny and bloodcovered white boychild standing on what was left of his property sawing at it with a knife and hauling on the skin and...

He couldn’t imagine using the word ‘rewarding’ about a work of art – for instance that such and such a book has given me so much, taught me so much, etc etc. – but thought...

Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.

He ate and drank the precious words,His spirit grew robust;He knew no more that he was poor,Nor that his frame was dust.He danced along the dingy days,And this bequest of wingsWas but a book. What...

I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in...

When it begins it is like a light in a tunnel, a rush of steel andsteam across a torn up life. It is a low rumble, an earthquake in theback of the mind. My spine...

Çocuk müthişti. Kaldırımda yürümüyordu, ama kaldırımın hemen dibinden, dümdüz bir çizgide yürüyormuş gibi yapıyordu, çoğu çocuklar gibi ve durmadan, “Yakalarsa birini biri, çavdarlar arasında,” şarkısını söylüyordu. Güzel bir sesi vardı. Üstelik, şarkıyı felaket iyi söylüyordu....

Literature should be a kind of revolutionary manifesto against established morality and established society.

(Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.) You do not immortalize the lost by writing about...

Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature

Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside...

The desire for glory is no different from that instinct for preservation that is common to all creatures. It is as if we enhance our being if we can gain a place in the memory...

A good story will always outlive the truth.

It didn’t help that I was never allowed to study anything remotely contemporary until the last year of university: there was never any sense of that leading to this. If anything, my education gave me...

He whom the gods love dies young.

The re-evaluation and rediscovery of minority art (including the cultural minority of women) is often conceived as a matter of remedying injustice and exclusiveness through doing justice to individual artists by allowing their work into...

Thus like a Captive in an Isle confin’d,Man walks at large, a Pris’ner of the Mind

Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.

When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do...

In our modern world, this elemental quality of storytelling is denied. We live today in a world in which everything has its place and function and nothing is left out of place. Storytelling is thus...

Recognize that you have been chosen to be alive, right now, at this exact moment in time and know that none of that is random. There is something about you, your past or your future...

Unless their use by readers bring them to life, books are indeed dead things.

Which is probably one of the reasons those of us who love contemporary fiction love it as we do. We’re alone with it. It arrives without references, without credentials we can trust. Givers of prizes...

When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfarthers of Blair and little Bush were scratching around in caves.

Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.

Allein die Literatur erlaubt uns, mit dem Geist eines Toten in Verbindung zu treten, auf direkte, umfassendere und tiefere Weise, als das selbst in einem Gespräch mit einem Freund möglich wäre – denn so tief...

All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.

An unfinished book. left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will and ruthless determination to tame it again.

[On Female Attraction to Men in Uniform] That male military persona feeds a subconscious, passive-aggressive female desire to dominate the warrior as he is perceived an iconic example of masculinity (particularly amongst traditionally warlike cultures)....

Books had taught me new ideas and had shown me ways of life that I would not have known about otherwise, and they offered a refuge when, like now, real life seemed too hard.

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

The literature [Nobel] laureate of this year has said that an author can do anything as long as his readers believe him.A scientist cannot do anything that is not checked and rechecked by scientists of...

Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons,...

Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered

And that is to say, of course, that you can “read” a culture without its literature, without the bother of gathering and holding its ideas, considering their genesis and evolution, and weighing them in the...

In this course I have tried to reveal the mechanism of those wonderful toys — literary masterpieces. I have tried to make of you good readers who read books not for the infantile purpose of...

And if I am not mistaken here is the secret of the greatness that was Spain. In Spain it is men that are the poems, the pictures and the buildings. Men are its philosophies. They...

Don’t you think our society is designed to kill in that way? Of course, you’ve surely heard about those tiny fish in the rivers of Brazil which attack the swimmer by the thousands, eat him...

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

FROG, n. A reptile with edible legs. The first mention of frogs in profane literature is in Homer’s narrative of the war between them and the mice. Skeptical persons have doubted Homer’s authorship of the...

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

The stories are not made, they are discovered.

Ebediyet çok uzundur.

Sang Ly, we are literature-our lives, our hopes, our desires, our despairs, our passions, our strengths, our weaknesses. Stories express our longing not only to make a difference today but to see what is possible...

There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D.H. Lawrence had known that. You needed love, but not the kind of love most people used and were used up by. Old D.H....