Literary Works Quotes - Page 2

• [Bob Dylan] builds his lyrics, of course, from personal experience, but it's also a literary work. He draws heavily on his knowledge of American lyric tradition as well as European modernism. But he should let the Nobel Prize Committee know if he is accepting it or not.

  Sjon

  Bob, Tradition, Accepting

  Source: wwd.com

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• I'm a pluralist about perspectives on literature. There seem to me to be all sorts of illuminating ways of responding to major literary works, some of them paying considerable attention to context, others applying various theoretical ideas, yet others focusing on details of language, or linking the work to the author's life, or connecting it with other works.

  Philip Kitcher

  Ideas, Perspective, Details

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.

  Franz Kafka

  Reading, Ice, Sea

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• 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 want to preserve. As readers, the closest way we can engage with a literary work is to protect its indeterminacy; to return ourselves and it to a place that precludes complete recognition. Really, when I’m reading, all I want is to stand amazed in front of an unknown object at odds with the world.

  M. John Harrison

  Reading, Writing, Knowing

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• Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore.

  Stendhal

  Gun, Politics, Impossible

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• Every few seconds a new book sees the light of day. Most of them will just be a part of the hum that makes us hard of hearing. Even the book is becoming an instrument of forgetting. A truly literary work comes into being as its creator's cry of protest against the forgetting that looms over him, over his predecessors and his contemporaries alike, and over his time, and the language he speaks. A literary work is something that defies death.

  Ivan Klíma

  Book, Light, Literature

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• The period that I could consider the most important in my literary work came about beginning with the Revolution, and in a certain way, developed as a consequence of the Revolution. But it was also a result of the counterrevolutionary coup of November 1975.

  Jose Saramago

  Important, Way, Revolution

  "Interview with Jose Saramago, Author of Blindness". Political Affairs Magazine Interview, www.politicalaffairs.net. March 2006.

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• When we read a literary work (or, in some instances, listen to music) our imagination is stimulated, we feel various emotions, and we arrive at new judgments. These attitudes are brought into relation with many others, including our standing tendencies to think and feel in particular ways, and we try to fit our psychological capacities and responses together.

  Philip Kitcher

  Attitude, Thinking, Imagination

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I very comprehensively studied Irving Thalberg and his biographies. He's who [Scott] Fitzgerald roughly modeled the character after. He worked for him, as a writer, when he was at MGM. And, of course, I revisited the novel and the politics of MGM and the studio system at the time and familiarized myself with the world. There was a great deal of physical and literary work that went into it.

  Matt Bomer

  Character, Scott Fitzgerald, World

  "Matt Bomer on 'The Last Tycoon' and His Long-Gestating Montgomery Clift Biopic". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. June 28, 2016.

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• In the history of the world the Vedas fill a gap which no literary work in any other language could fill. I maintain that to everybody who cares for himself for his ancestors for his intellectual development a study of the Vedic literature is indeed indispensable.

  Max Muller

  Intellectual, Vedas, Who Cares

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• One thing for sure is it will be written in the Icelandic language. All of my literary work is.

  Sjon

  Language, Written, One Thing

  Source: wwd.com

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• 'Freeing' a literary work into the public domain is less a public benefit than a transfer of wealth from the families of American writers to the executives and stockholders of various businesses who will continue to profit from, for example, 'The Garden Party,' while the descendants of Katherine Mansfield will not.

  Mark Helprin

  Party, Garden, Example

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• In my profession more generally, it's not an exaggeration to say that masculinity is viewed as the root of all evil. If you were to take a literary theory course, you might think it would be about literature, but it's really not. It's about all the various forms of oppression on earth and how we can see them playing out in literary works. And behind all these forms of oppression is a guy.

  Jonathan Gottschall

  Thinking, Literary Theory, Roots

  "A Talk With The Savage English Professor". Interview with Sam Harris, www.thedailybeast.com. March 5, 2015.

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• The most accomplished literary work would be reduced to nothing by carping criticism, if the author would listen to all critics and allow every one to erase the passage which pleases him the least.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Criticism, Would Be, Accomplished

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• It's still true that literary works by women, gays, and writers of color are often framed as specific, rather than universal, small rather than big, personal or particular rather than socially significant.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Gay, Color, Literature

  Cheryl Strayed (2013). “Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There”, p.45, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• I used to do miserably in English literature, which I thought was a sign of moral turpitude. As I look back on it, I think it was rather to my credit. The notion of actually putting writers' words into other words is quite ridiculous because why bother if writers mean what they mean, and if they don't, why read them? There is, I suppose, a case for studying literary works in depth, but I don't quite know what 'in depth' means unless you read a paragraph over and over again.

  Patricia Wentworth

  Education, Mean, Thinking

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• I enjoyed Jonathan Franzen's 'Freedom.' Would I make that into a film? I think it's better suited to television. That would very much be a dialogue and performance piece, and it would take some very skilful direction - but not my kind of directing. But I thought it was a real literary work.

  Peter Weir

  Real, Thinking, Pieces

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• I am more affected by the attractions of virtue than by the deformities of vice; I turn gently away from the wicked and I fly to meet the good. If there is in a literary work, in a character, in a picture, in a statue, a beautiful spot, that is where my eyes rest; I see only that, I remember only that, all the rest is well-nigh forgotten. What becomes of me when the whole work is beautiful!

  Denis Diderot

  Beautiful, Character, Eye

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• There is a difference between dramatizing your sensibility and your personality. The literary works which we think of as classicsdid the former. Much modern writing does the latter, and so has an affinity with, say, night-club acts in all their shoddy immediacy.

  Paul Horgan

  Writing, Night, Thinking

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• My grandfather was a most gifted person, and amongst his many qualities, one of them had always particularly impressed me. While the past was a book he had read and re-read may times, the future was just one more literary work of art into which he used to pour himself with deep thought and concentration. Innumerable people since his death have told me how he used to read in the future, and this certainly was one of his very great strengths.

  Aga Khan IV

  Art, Book, Past

  "My Beloved Grandfather: A few words by Mowlana Hazar Imam, His Highness the Aga Khan IV". www.amaana.org. November 1977.

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• No one knows the nature of God, or even if God exists. In a sense, all of our religions are literary works of the imagination.

  Alan Lightman

  Imagination, God Exists, Knows

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• I divide all literary works into two categories: Those I like and those I don't like. No other criterion exists for me.

  Anton Chekhov

  Two, Criteria, Categories

  Anton Chekhov's letter to I.L. Leontev, March 22, 1890.

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• One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages.

  Naguib Mahfouz

  Literature, Language, Nobel

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