Inequality was the price of civilization.

Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain,...

Literature simply becomes richer after you’ve been fired, rejected, stranded, or had to change a few midnight diapers.

Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the...

Hat im 20. Jahrhundert irgendein anderer Roman so nachhaltig gewirkt wie”Pippi Langstrumpf”?

The Meadow… Only one of them succeeded in making a life here… He weathered. Before a backdrop of natural beauty, he lived a life from which everything was taken but a place. He lived so...

Considering that the modern and contemporary literature taught in most universities is largely bleak, cynical, morbid, pessimistic, misanthropic dogmatism, often written by suicidal types who sooner or later kill themselves with alcohol or drugs, or...

Knowing that others want to read my writing is the greatest inspiration to write.

If [literature] should turn into pure propaganda or pure entertainment, society will slip back into the sty of the immediate — which is to say, the memoryless existence of hymenoptera and gastropods. None of this...

Imagine that the genome is a book.There are twenty-three chapters, called CHROMOSOMES.Each chapter contains several thousand stories, called GENES.Each story is made up of paragraphs, called EXTONS, which are interrupted by advertisements called INTRONS.Each paragraph...

When a child is born, I once explained to the kids, some dads lay down bottles of wine for them that will mature when they grow up into ungrateful adults. Instead, what you’re going to...

I had as yet no notion that life every now and then becomes literature—not for long, of course, but long enough to be what we best remember, and often enough so that what we eventually...

I wish I’d known those words on the day I watched those German troops land, plane-load after plane-load of them—and come off ships down in the harbor! All I could think of was damn them,...

I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers.

Gıli Gıli duygularını yumuşatmak için balkondaki kırık kiremitlerin arasına sakladığı ojesini çıkarıp defalarca soludu. Oje kokusu ruhuna yayıldıkça gövdesi hafifledi.

The ”text” is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

Irma, she said. But I had started to walk away. I heard her say some more things but by then I had yanked my skirt up and was running down the road away from her...

How keen everyone is to make this world their home forgetting its impermanence It’s like trying to see and name constellations in a fireworks display.

I never want a girl to lose all hope that her life can’t completely turn around, even if she feels that she is at the edge, standing on one foot, and ready to say goodbye.

One of the biggest problems in literature is the lack of subtlety.

A word (…) is never the destination, merely a signpost in its general direction; and whatever (…) body that destination finally acquires owes quite as much to the reader as to the writer.

We have invented the literature because the reality wasn’t imaginative enough and we also wanted to be alone, at least for a while!

I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around...

Just the great ones. Ignore the others. There’s not enough time.

When I met a truly beautiful girl, I would tell her that if she spent the night with me, I would write a novel or a story about her. This usually worked; and if her...

..if you could forget mortality… You could really believe that time is circular, and not linear and progressive as our culture is bent on proving. Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making,...

If you cannot be a sun that illuminates the light, be a moon that never tires of reflecting the light.

Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place. That was its role in the world, I’d started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn’t matter and...

You only benefit from books if you can give something back to them. What I mean is, if you approach them in the spirit of a duel, so you can both wound and be wounded,...

It’s funny, in literature no one ever goes to the lavatory.

We have just discovered our dear colleague butchered in a hotel room, and you wish to discuss literature?

…to use the little kick of energy which opposition supplies to be more vigorously oneself.

Edebi eserler, insanı yeni ve mesut, başka iyi ve güzel bir dünyaya götürmeye yardım etmiyorlarsa neye yarar?

A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle…

The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes...

Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature

PLATITUDE, n. The fundamental element and special glory of popular literature. A thought that snores in words that smoke. The wisdom of a million fools in the diction of a dullard. A fossil sentiment in...

I think that I had better go, Holmes.””Not a bit, doctor. Stay where you are. I am lost without my Boswell.

Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there...

Intimate relationships are a gold mine for literature to explore, to understand, to describe.

Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.

Herkes general olursa savaşı kazanacak kişi kalmaz.

Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.

For the majority of people, though they do not know what to do with this life, long for another that shall have no end.

The book of the Psalms, which is the primary devotional literature of the whole Bible, is full of complaints.

The night is still waiting.

Sound unbound by nature becomes bounded by art.

Don Quixote is not just Don Quixote; La Mancha is not just geography; It is our personal territory—Terra Nostra.

It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel...