If I understand you rightly, you had formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to– Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you...

These studies are the result of my attempt to extract the essence of literature. Literature is either the essential or nothing. I believe that the Evil—an acute form of Evil—which it expresses, has a sovereign...

I think genre rules should be porous, if not nonexistent.

This is all a tale of an older world and a forgotten countryside. At this moment of time change has come; a screaming line of steel runs through the heather of no-man’s-land, and the holiday-maker...

The world of books, the greatest possessions.

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

What great literature does best is to show us those moments which make life worth living.

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...

A book isn’t a single, static thing with one unarguable meaning. Each reader who comes to it brings his own special knowledge, habits and attitudes. Each reader reads a different book. Each reader imagines a...

A man may be ‘dated’ in the sense that the forms, the set-up, the paraphernalia, whereby he expresses the matter of permanent interest, are those of a particular age. In that sense the greatest writers...

I think that the thematic, formal history of the literary form ultimately harkens back to a different political system. That is to say, a feudal order: the aristocratic dispensation of leisure time, the refinements of...

That cloak of love you were wearing—he’s torn it to shreds, undoing the seams of trust that held it together. How can you ever wear those shreds?

Eğer kederlenmek istemiyorsan, kendini üzüntüye kaptırmamalısın. Ne kadar az kaygılanırsan, kaygılanacağın konu da o kadar azalır.

Allah herşeyi görüyorsa niçin bütün dertleri bir tek kişinin omuzlarına yüklüyor? Bir parça insaflı olamaz mı?

Annant is Pickwick paperless, the hunter of wisdom and due to Lovelace heart, a budding poet-ass.

Pinapakita nyong mga dayuhang libro pa rin at mga dayuhang libro lang ang tinatangkilik ng mga tao. Bakit magsusugal ang mga publisher sa Pilipinong manunulat kung hindi naman pala mabili ang mga kwentong isinusulat ng...

Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.

There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.

Deliver thunder, GodIf you choose not to talk.

A big desire is not enough to meet the expectations of lost dreams.

I travel, always arriving in the same place.

The image of a wood has appeared often enough in English verse. It has indeed appeared so often that it has gathered a good deal of verse into itself; so that it has become a...

The world is a navy in an empty ocean.

Everything seems impossible And everything seems possible.

Beyond all vanities, fights, and desires, omnipotent silence lies.

Now that we are all so smart, we don’t easily find resolutions.

He did not profess to anybody how to reach others without professing.