Literature Quotes - Page 12

• New Yorkers are mostly interested in New York - in case you haven't noticed.

  Jim Harrison

  New York, Cases, Havens

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, themorningnews.org. June 7, 2004.

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• I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.

  Jim Harrison

  Book, Poetry, Magazines

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• I rarely read or buy a book because of a review.

  Jim Harrison

  Book, Reviews

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, themorningnews.org. June 7, 2004.

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• I should add that I very much enjoy certain cities especially Paris, New York and Chicago.

  Jim Harrison

  New York, Cities, Paris

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• I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.

  Jim Harrison

  Writing, Prose

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• There are, it is true, at present no great prizes in literature such as are offered by the learned professions, but there are quite as many small ones - competences; while, on the other hand, it is not so much of a lottery.

  James Payn

  Hands, Competence, Profession

  James Payn (1882). “Sammlung”

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• Literature usually begets literature.

  Susan Sontag

  Begets

  Susan Sontag (2013). “Against Interpretation and Other Essays”, p.72, Penguin UK

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• I don't know about you, but I can never get enough David Letterman.

  Barbara Walters

  Atheist, Equal Pay, Sin City

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• To not sing with an orchestra, to not be able to communicate through my voice, which I've done all my life, and not to be able to phrase lyrics and give people that kind of joy, I think I would be totally devastated.

  Barbara Walters

  Thinking, Voice, People

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• Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a 'work' of man.

  Mary McCarthy

  Men, Identity, Doe

  Mary McCarthy (1961). “On the contrary”, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy

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• We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.

  Elizabeth Drew

  Pain, Loss, Frustration

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• A critic is a lug-worm in the liver of literature.

  Lawrence Durrell

  Criticism, Worms, Critics

  Lawrence Durrell (2015). “The Avignon Quintet: Monsieur, Livia, Constance, Sebastian and Quinx”, p.193, Faber & Faber

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• If you're a Conservative, why aren't you behind conserving the land?

  Ken Kesey

  Land, Conservative, Behinds

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• Exciting literature after supper is not the best digestive.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Exciting, Supper

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935). “The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography”, p.20, Univ of Wisconsin Press

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• Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind.

  Florence King

  Mind, World, Nostalgia

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• Under adversity, under oppression, the words begin to fail, the easy words begin to fail. In order to convey things accurately, the human being is almost forced to find the most precise words possible, which is a precondition for literature.

  Rita Dove

  Adversity, Order, Failing

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• You see Michelangelo and Picasso and you read literature. I had some innate inchoate yearning for that, but I never really saw where I would fit in. That's called art. And then something happened to pop music, which is that it became art under the hand of the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan and some other people.

  David Chase

  Art, Hands, People

  "David Chase's teenage dreams" by Lorraine Cwelich, www.interviewmagazine.com. December 20, 2012.

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• Literature is the garden of wisdom.

  James Ellis

  Garden

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• Half of the ills we hoard within our hearts
  Are ills because we hoard them.

  Bryan Procter

  Heart, Half, Heard

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• In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.

  Julian Barnes

  Art, Order, Different

  Julian Barnes, Vanessa Guignery, Ryan Roberts (2009). “Conversations with Julian Barnes”, p.65, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.

  Anthony Burgess

  Uplifting, Philosophy, Dull

  Anthony Burgess (2012). “The Kingdom of the Wicked”, p.4, Allison & Busby

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• With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.

  Anthony Burgess

  Cottages, Agents, Hungry

  Anthony Burgess (1990). “You've had your time: being the second part of the confessions of Anthony Burgess”, Heinemann Educational Books

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• There is nothing like becoming a mom to fill you with fear.

  Arianna Huffington

  Mom, Becoming, Becoming A Mom

  "A Conversation Between Arianna and Her Daughters". Interview with Arianna Huffington, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 9, 2007.

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• America was and is the immigrant's dream.

  Don DeLillo

  Dream, America, Immigrants

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.88, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.

  Don DeLillo

  Waiting, Ends, Sentences

  Don DeLillo (2016). “Mao II”, p.34, Pan Macmillan

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