In other words, we may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely on the facts actually before us, force them to turn into adventures; force them to give up their meaning and fulfill their mysterious purpose.

Esteem him! Like him! Cold-hearted Elinor! Oh! worse than cold-hearted! Ashamed of being otherwise. Use those words again, and I will leave the room this moment.

Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature is nevertheless only conceivable in terms of a desire for fundamental communication with the reader.

You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following...

For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints.

What is literature, and why do I try to write about it? I don’t know. Likewise, I don’t know why I go on living, most of the time. But this not knowing is precisely what...

I do think that part of literature’s job is to comment on and participate in the social issues of the time.

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...

I place my fingers upon these keys typing 2,000 dreams per minute and naked of spirit dance forth my cosmic vortex upon this crucifix called language.

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put...

literature is a way in which we can learn to live deeper lives — husband with wife, parent with child, brother with sister, fellow member with fellow member. Most good authors are better than we...

It is difficult when reading the description of certain fictional characters not at the same time to imagine the real-life acquaintances who they most closely, if often unexpectedly, resemble.

Ağıtı asıl yönetenler ölünün kadın akrabalarıydı. Ağıtta eski geleneklerle kurulmuş, soğukkanlılıkla düşünülmüş bir düzen bulunduğu anlaşılıyordu. Akrabalığı uzakça olanlar tabutun yanında biraz duruyorlar, seslerini fazla yükseltmeden ağlayarak bir şeyler söylüyorlardı. Daha yakın olanlar eşikten girer...

Aptallar öğretmeyi, akıllılar ise öğrenmeyi sever.

Dakin: The more you read, though, the more you’ll see that literature is actually about losers.Scripps: No.Dakin: It’s consolation. All literature is consolation.

Writing, painting, singing–it cannot stop everything. Cannot halt death in its tracks. But perhaps it can make the pause between death’s footsteps sound and look and feel beautiful, can make the space of waiting a...

Perhaps somebody has alredy written it. But I want to write a story from the end till the very beginning.

Like Solzhenitsyn, I shall return, one bright dusk.

Every thought about death takes a moment of life away.

A hidden spark of the dream sleeps In the forest and waits In the celestial spheres of the brain.

He will understand when it is too late that it is easier to love.

The world is always open, Waiting to be discovered.

To understand possible means to understand impossible.

Get out, but don’t cause unneeded accidents.

In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.

Statesmen are grocers, ambitious clowns.