Literature Quotes - Page 37

• What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism .

  Terry Eagleton

  Literary Theory, Literary Genre, Practice

  Terry Eagleton (2011). “Literary Theory: An Introduction”, p.79, John Wiley & Sons

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• It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.

  Terry Eagleton

  Language, Speak

  Terry Eagleton (2011). “Literary Theory: An Introduction”, p.120, John Wiley & Sons

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• Without charm there can be no fine literature, as there can be no perfect flower without fragrance.

  Arthur Symons

  Flower, Perfect, Charm

  Arthur Symons (1958). “The symbolist movement in literature”

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• From our human experience and history, at least as far as I am informed, I know that everything essential and great has only emerged when human beings had a home and were rooted in a tradition. Today's literature is, for instance, largely destructive.

  Martin Heidegger

  Home, Essentials, Today

  "Der Spiegel" Magazine, May 31, 1976.

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• James Joyce is a cul-de-sac. [Ulysses is] ... an example how literature branched out and went into, lost itself in nowhere, no man's land.

  Werner Herzog

  Men, Land, Example

  "Was the 20th Century a Mistake?". Interview with Paul Holdengräber, www.nypl.org. February 16, 2007.

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• If you tell certain people that you like Kerouac, they assume that's all you read, like you don't know anything else about literature. I recognize all the things that people dislike about the way he writes - his tone and the sentimentality of it all. But those books were there for me at a very important point in my life.

  Ben Gibbard

  Book, Writing, People

  "The Meaning of Life" by Ben Gibbard, www.pastemagazine.com. April 10, 2008.

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• One thing I discovered is that the book world is vast. It's easy to walk around the store - even the room with literature and poetry, where I work most often - and feel overwhelmed.

  Kevin Sampsell

  Book, Rooms, World

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• From a really young age, I was reading like a writer. I was reading for the deep understanding of the literature; not simply to hear the story but to understand how the author got the story on the page.

  Jacqueline Woodson

  Reading, Deep Understanding, Age

  Source: www.npr.org

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• There's that lovely thing for the first month or two of writing a new book: OK, I don't know what that character's going to do, but we'll find out later. After about three or four months you come to that bit where you've got to put some plot in before it's too late, and you have to go back and start inserting plot, and, ooh, I've left out the literature, OK, lets put some in.

  Terry Pratchett

  Book, Writing, Character

  Source: www.theguardian.com

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• My novels are in the literature section as opposed to the romance section of bookstores because they're not romance novels. If I tried to have them published as romances, they'd be rejected. I write dramatic fiction; a further sub-genre would classify them as love stories.

  Nicholas Sparks

  Writing, Romance, Bookstores

  "Nicholas Sparks, Author of 'Nights in Rodanthe' and 'The Notebook'". Live Q&A, www.washingtonpost.com. September 17, 2008.

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• I am certain that there are two things in life which are dependable: the delights of the flesh and the delights of literature. I have had the good fortune to enjoy them both equally.

  Peter Greenaway

  Things In Life, Two, Together

  "Fictional character: Nagiko". "The Pillow Book", www.imdb.com. 1996.

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• My area of research is something that in all fairness has no practical usability whatsoever and the thing is I'm often asked to apologize for that. It is interesting to me that people ask 'what's the point of doing that if it's not useful?' But they never ask that, or do they very rarely ask that about art or literature or music. Those things are not gonna produce a better toaster.

  Lawrence M. Krauss

  Art, People, Interesting

  YouTube Channel "Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science"/"Lawrence Krauss Discussion (1/12) - Richard Dawkins", www.youtube.com. April 14, 2008.

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• The destination of the soul: this is what I, led on by Nils Holgersson, came to seek in the literature of Western Europe. I fervently hope that my pursuit, as a Japanese, of literature and culture will, in some small measure, repay Western Europe for the light it has shed upon the human condition.

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Light, Europe, Soul

  Speech at the Nobel Banquet, www.nobelprize.org. December 10, 1994.

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• From literature to ecology, from the escape velocity of galaxies to the greenhouse effect, from garbage disposal methods to traffic jams, everything is discussed in our world. But the democratic system, as if it were a given fact, untouchable by nature until the end of time, we don't discuss that.

  Jose Saramago

  Garbage Disposal, Our World, Jam

  Jose Saramago's intervention in the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, February 1992.

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• My work is based on a tradition quite distinct from the Eckersberg tradition, a Nordic line of development that had never been clearly and consistently defined in the literature on art. This line is not a straight one; it has the strangest and most fascinating twists and curves, and includes such artists as Edvard Munch, Ernest Josephson, Hill, Hansen Jacobsen, Johannes Holbek, Jens Lund, and Emile Nolde. Not all of them equally well known.

  Asger Jorn

  Art, Curves, Twists

  "Fortaelleren Asger Jorn" by Gunnar Jespersen, (p. 121), 1984.

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• One of the most insidious myths in American wine culture is that a wine is good if you like it. Liking a wine has nothing to do with whether it is good. Liking a wine has to do with liking that wine, period. Wine requires two assessments: one subjective, the other objective. In this it is like literature. You may not like reading Shakespeare but agree that Shakespeare was a great writer nonetheless.

  Karen MacNeil

  Reading, Wine, Two

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• The curse of Scottish literature is the lack of a whole language, which finally means the lack of a whole mind.

  Edwin Muir

  Mean, Mind, Language

  1936 Scott and Scotland, introduction.

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• Literature is subservient to nothing but truth.

  Gao Xingjian

  Subservient

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• If literature is to transcend political interference and return to being a testimony of man and his existential predicament, it needs first to break away from ideology. To be without "isms," is to return to the individual and to return to viewing the world through the eyes of the writer, an individual who relies on his own perceptions and does not act as a spokesman for the people. The people already have rulers and election campaigners speaking in their name.

  Gao Xingjian

  Eye, Men, Names

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• Literary revolution and revolutionary literature did not create a beautiful new world but instead divested literature of its basic nature, promoted violence, and, by resorting to linguistic violence, made a battlefield of this domain of spiritual freedom.

  Gao Xingjian

  Beautiful, Spiritual, World

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• When I came overseas, I realized that there are many ideologies and many trends, and it's also very hard to produce honest art and honest literature. I decided that I didn't want to follow any of these ideologies or trends, because that's also a kind of pressure that doesn't allow absolute freedom. So I decided that I was only going to produce works that were satisfactory to me, and that meant not following any trends and being anti-ideological.

  Gao Xingjian

  Art, Pressure, Trends

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• In my view the time for rousing revolutionary literature has passed, because the revolution has already revolutionised itself to death and has left behind only bitterness and a sort of weariness, listlessness and even nausea.

  Gao Xingjian

  Views, Nausea, Bitterness

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• Since it was announced that I had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Chinese Foreign Ministry has condemned my works and criticized them harshly. All of my works are now banned from getting into China or being published in China. What author would want to return to a country that banned his or her books?

  Gao Xingjian

  Country, Book, Chinese

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• Literature remains an indispensable human activity, in which the reader and the writer are engaged of their own volition. Hence, literature has no duty to the masses or society, and ethical or moral pronouncements added by busybody critics are of no concern to the writer.

  Gao Xingjian

  Moral, Ethical, Mass

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• Paradoxically, the simpler poetry is, the more difficult it becomes for a critic to discuss intelligently. Trained to explicate, the critic often loses the ability to evaluate literature outside the critical act. A work is good only in proportion to the richness and complexity of interpretations it provokes.

  Dana Gioia

  Proportion, Interpretation, Difficult

  Dana Gioia (2002). “Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture”, Graywolf Pr

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