There is a broad cultural current that conveys the idea that a film is like a football team, it represents a nation, it is illustrated literature, filmed radio. These are outdated concepts, totally out of touch with today's realities.
Literature is about as unnecessarily necessarily as tableware or ironed shirts.
One of the great joys of my job is that you spend a huge amount of time investigating different areas of literature.
Just as words have two functions - information and creation - so each human mind has two personalities, one on the surface, one deeper down. The upper personality... is conscious and alert... The lower personality is a... perfect fool, but without it there is no literature.
The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.
We are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence.
When tempest tossed, embrace chaos
Romance is the poetry of literature.
Our leading men are not of much account and never have been, but the average of the people is immense, beyond all history. Sometimes I think in all departments, literature and art included, that will be the way our superiority will exhibit itself. We will not have great individuals or great leaders, but a great average bulk, unprecedentedly great.
I've been an avid consumer of young adult literature since I was one, and I think some people leave that stuff behind when they become old adults, but I never did. I was always interested in the fantasy world created in those novels.
There is something very romantic about the orphan figure in American literature.
We don't have the choice to control our emotions, but we do have the power to educate our emotions. And we do that through literature and through art and music to give ourselves a repertoire of emotional experiences.
Within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves.
It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.
Storytelling is how we survive, when there's no feed, the story feeds something, it feeds the spirit, the imagination. I can't imagine life without stories, stories from my parents, my culture. Stories from other people's parents, their culture. That's how we learn from each other, it's the best way. That's why literature is so important, it connects us heart to heart.
A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.
I have a passion for ballad. . . . They are the gypsy children of song, born under green hedgerows in the leafy lanes and bypaths of literature,--in the genial Summertime.
When the heroes go off the stage, the clowns come on.
We now assume that when people turn on the evening news, they basically already know what the news is. They've heard it on the radio. They've seen it on the Internet. They've seen it on one of the cable companies. So that makes our job a bit different.
Universities incline wits to sophistry and affectation.
Literature is capable of being a subject that people want to catch up on or discuss, whether at a coffee shop or a watercooler. It can become an intrinsic part of their dialogue.
How can we speak of right and justice if we take an innocent creature and shed its blood? How can we pray to God for mercy if we ourselves have no mercy? Nobel laureate in literature.
Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does nore than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read.
False shame accompanies a man that is poor, shame that either harms a man greatly or profits him; shame is with poverty, but confidence with wealth.
Often an entire city has suffered because of an evil man.
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