906 Literature Quotes

Gertrude Stein, all courage and will, is a soldier of minimalism. Her work, unlike the resonating silences in the art of Samuel Beckett, embodies in its loquacity and verbosity the curious paradox of the minimalist form. This art of the nuance in repetition and placement she shares with the orchestral compositions of Philip Glass.

If they had said that the sun or the moon had gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of a more awful and dreary blank in creation than the words: 'Byron is dead!'

Let me stop there, but my God, how beautiful Shakespeare is, who else is as mysterious as he is; his language and method are like a brush trembling with excitement and ecstasy. But one must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.

Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he'd never have written a word.

To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate - unlike most films.

The best book on programming for the layman is 'Alice in Wonderland'; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

Barchester Towers has become one of those novels which do not die quite at once, which live and are read for perhaps a quarter of a century.

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.

Some books makes me want to go adventuring, others feel that they have saved me the trouble.

Faust, the Ninth Symphony, and the will of Adolf Hitler are eternal youth and know neither time nor transience.

I read world literature and I read French romances in the originals. I had quite a profound knowledge - no, that sounds conceited, but I did have a profound interest in everything spiritual.

Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.

All the excitements of a prohibited book had their usual effect, one of which, as always, is to expose the fact that the censors don't know what they are talking about.

In an age of global standardization, regional voices also remind both writer and reader that no life is lived generically. If the purpose of literature is truly, as the ancients insisted, to instruct and delight, then what better to understand and enjoy than the here and the now?

Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture.

Shakespeare's fault is not the greatest into which a poet may fall. It merely indicates a deficiency of taste.

I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.

So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter.

There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.

You know, whenever women make imaginary female kingdoms in literature, they are always very permissive, to use the jargon word, and easy and generous and self-indulgent, like the relationships between women when there are no men around. They make each other presents, and they have little feasts, and nobody punishes anyone else. This is the female way of going along when there are no men about or when men are not in the ascendant.

Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.

What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.

The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don't know - Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel - the quality of philosophy.

The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means toward it.

It is with literature as with law or empire - an established name is an estate in tenure, or a throne in possession.

Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.

A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.

There Shakespeare, on whose forehead climb The crowns o' the world; oh, eyes sublime With tears and laughter for all time!

And Chaucer, with his infantine Familiar clasp of things divine.

And Marlowe, Webster, Fletcher, Ben, Whose fire-hearts sowed our furrows when The world was worthy of such men.

'Literature, outside of the masters, has given us but one idea of the mistress, the subtle, calculating siren who delights to prey on the souls of men. The journalism and the moral pamphleteering of the time seem to foster it with almost partisan zeal. It would seem that a censorship of life had been established by divinity, and the care of its execution given into the hands of the utterly conservative. Yet there is that other form of liaison which has nothing to do with conscious calculation. In the vast majority of cases it is without design or guile. The average woman, controlled by her affections and deeply in love, is no more capable than a child of anything save sacrificial thought - the desire to give; and so long as this state endures, she can only do this. She may change - Hell hath no fury, etc. - but the sacrificial, yielding, solicitous attitude is more often the outstanding characteristic of the mistress; and it is this very attitude in contradistinction to the grasping legality of established matrimony that has caused so many wounds in the defenses of the latter. The temperament of man, either male or female, cannot help falling down before and worshiping this non-seeking, sacrificial note. It approaches vast distinction in life. It appears to be related to that last word in art, that largeness of spirit which is the first characteristic of the great picture, the great building, the great sculpture, the great decoration - namely, a giving, freely and without stint, of itself, of beauty.'

Works by Thomas Paine at Project Gutenberg

Some say the Great American Novel is 'Huckleberry Finn,' some say it's 'The Jungle,' some say it's 'The Great Gatsby.' But my vote goes to the tale with the maximum lust, hypocrisy and obsession - the view of America that could only have come from an outsider - Nabokov's 'Lolita. ... 'Those who bought 'Lolita' looking for mere prurient kicks must surely have been disappointed. 'Lolita' is dark and twisted all right, but it's also a corruptly beautiful love story of two tragically alike, id-driven souls... What makes 'Lolita' a work of greatness isn't that its title has become ingrained in the vernacular, isn't that was a generation ahead of America in fetishizing young girls. No, it is the writing, the way Nabokov bounces around in words like the English language is a toy trunk, the sly wit, the way it's devastating and cynical and heartbreaking all at once. Poor old Dolly Haze might not have grown up very well, but 'Lolita' forever remains a thing of timeless beauty.

William Faulkner's Nobel Prize Speech

Saroyan's output from 1934 to 1940 established his reputation. What enthralled critics and readers was the brashness and certainty of his daring: Beginning with his first collection of linked short stories - written in 30 days, a story each day - and mailed off to Whit Burnett at Story Magazine. This was a new, fresh, exuberant kind of writing, intensely personal, prose poems which departed from customary narrative structures and sauntered elliptically with the awe of a young man fully realizing the most self-evident of truths: himself, alive upon the earth. ... My recollection of those first Saroyan stories is typical: watching his language mesh the spiritual hunger and the actual physical hunger of the penniless main character was to be in the presence of a breathtaking act of creation. Hope and possibility were mandatory components to the human comedy as Saroyan viewed it. Accepting madness as the only constant in the universe never precluded joy and laughter. Cynicism had no place in the way one approached each day. Whimsy, compassion, a ready smile and the gift of interior and exterior motion were to be the tools.

I'm reminded of the incident in the early 1950s when a suddenly-timorous Jack Kerouac reportedly met Saroyan and exclaimed, 'So you're the man who wrote 'The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse.' I've never forgotten that story!' That meeting, one could suggest, was inevitable. All the ingredients the Beats would incorporate into their canon had a germinal precedent in Saroyan's work: Rexroth's and Ferlinghetti's recognition of San Francisco's cultural civility and bohemian possibilities; Kerouac's interior monologues, frenzied energy and catch-all structureless narratives; and the Beat poets' looking toward the collected wisdom of Asia and its intermixed infusion of philosophical acceptance, respect for the earth and simplicity of style. ... It is difficult to conceive of the hippie phenomenon coming about without a Saroyan-like oeuvre as precursor ... what Saroyan added to the crucible of the writer defining his place upon the landscape was a remarkable insight into the creative process: Always walking the streets as if for the first time, noting nothing as insignificant and everything as meaningless, relishing the feel of the typewriter keyboard, crafting his words and himself as both a defiant and an absurd cackle at the universe.

Last Words in Shakespeare

Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience - 4000 critics.

All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the 'elect' have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so 'slow,' so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle - keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate. If he, according to tradition, merely translated it from certain ancient and mysteriously-engraved plates of copper, which he declares he found under a stone in an out-of-the-way locality, the work of translating was equally a miracle, for the same reason.

I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spencer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I'm not feeling so well myself.

[A] classic - something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR.

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.

Pilgrim's Progress, about a man that left his family, it didn't say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.

To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin.

Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

Biographies are but clothes and buttons of the man - the biography of the man himself cannot be written.

The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades.

The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.

Where are the braves, the faces like autumn fruit, who stared at the child from the coloured frontispiece?

And my tears, too, have stained this heirloomed ground, When reading in these treatises some weird Miracle, I turned a leaf and found A white hair fallen from my father's beard.

'O Russet Witch!'

Page 148 (paperback).

The Satanic school.

Kitty: Shikspur? Shikspur? Who wrote it? No, I never read Shikspur. Lady Bab: Then you have an immense pleasure to come.

It does not matter that Dicken's world is not lifelike; it is alive.

Poe is a kind of Hawthorne and delirium tremens.

Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw's prefaces.

Gertrude Stein, all courage and will, is a soldier of minimalism. Her work, unlike the resonating silences in the art of Samuel Beckett, embodies in its loquacity and verbosity the curious paradox of the minimalist form. This art of the nuance in repetition and placement she shares with the orchestral compositions of Philip Glass.

As learned commentators view In Homer more than Homer knew.

I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else's.

Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul [Minnesota] in 1959 and it blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke my own language.

Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages.

I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.

Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.

If they had said that the sun or the moon had gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of a more awful and dreary blank in creation than the words: 'Byron is dead!'

The world is rid of Lord Byron, but the deadly slime of his touch still remains.

The crown of literature is poetry.

He was the first writer I fell in love with, boyishly in love. I was held by his unaffected voice, his sentimentality, his defiant individualism. I found myself in the stories he told... I learned from Saroyan that you do not have to live in some great city - in New York or Paris - in order to write... When I was a student at Stanford, a generation ago, the name of William Saroyan was never mentioned by any professor in the English Department. William Saroyan apparently was not considered a major American talent. Instead, we undergraduates set about the business of psychoanalyzing Hamlet and deconstructing Lolita. In my mind Saroyan belongs with John Steinbeck, a fellow small town Californian and of the same generation. He belongs with Thornton Wilder, with those writers whose aching love of America was formed by the Depression and the shadow of war. ... Saroyan's prose is as plain as it is strong. He talks about the pleasure of drinking water from a hose on a summer afternoon in California's Central Valley, and he holds you with the pure line. My favorite is his novel The Human Comedy... In 1943, The Human Comedy became an MGM movie starring Mickey Rooney, but I always imagined Homer Macaulay as a darker, more soulful boy, someone who looked very much like a young William Saroyan...

He was not of an age, but for all time!

Algum tempo hesitei se devia abrir estas memorias pelo principio ou pelo fim, isto e, se poria em primeiro lugar o meu nascimento ou a minha morte. Suposto o uso vulgar seja comecar pelo nascimento, duas consideracoes me levaram a adotar diferente metodo: a primeira e que eu nao sou propriamente um autor defunto mas um defunto autor, para quem a campa foi outro berco; a segunda e que o escrito ficaria assim mais galante e mais novo. Moises, que tambem contou a sua morte, nao a pos no introito, mas no cabo: diferenca radical entre este livro e o Pentateuco.

The supreme black literary artist to date.

Machado de Assis is a kind of miracle, another demonstration of the autonomy of literary genius in regard to time and place, politics and religion.

Machado de Assis is almost certainly the greatest of all Portuguese-language novelists. He is also a novelist far ahead of his time. There is little in the twentieth-century novel that his subtle, ingenious and sardonic technical procedures do not anticipate. His style - elegant, cool, always restrained - is unsurpassed in the Portuguese language.

The greatest author ever produced in Latin America.

Not content with discoursing on supermen, the author presents them in the flesh - or whatever it is they are made of.

Franz Kafka is dead

Novalis has been, and remains, one of the most vital influences in German literature; the modern mystics: Maeterlinck, Herman Hesse and Rilke (often considered the greatest poet of the twentieth century) admit a great debt to him. ... Novalis expresses himself in a unique, personal style, almost as if he has discovered language by himself. ... Novalis himself wrote that he felt it necessary to develop a symbolic philosophical language for the purpose of protecting his deepest insights from those incapable of respecting them. In this he has not been alone - if we look at the words of the Sufis we often find mystical concepts veiled in poetic terms. ... The principle mode of concealment is the use of imagery. Images are used to veil meaning, but for those who share Novalis' love of symbolic imagery and subtle metaphor his language is a veil that enhances, rather than conceals, the beauty of his art. This use of concrete, palpable images overcame, to some extent, what he described as the 'poverty of words'; and avoided the use of philosophical terms to express abstract concepts. In some instances spiritual qualities are personified as characters, human or divine, as they are in Hindu mythology... Novalis is known as the originator of the central symbol of the German Romanticism, The Blue Flower; he shared in the movement's deification of Nature, the demand for the Absolute, the idea of spiritual rebirth. ... Novalis, like other poets of the period, wanted to return to the sense of the Sacred found in the humbler Medieval tradition with its great mystics such as Hildegard von Bingen and Meister Eckhart.

Mary Poppins advocates the kind of family life that Walt Disney had spent his career both chronicling and helping to foster on a national level: father at work, mother at home, children flourishing. It is tempting to imagine that in Travers he found a like-minded person, someone who embodied the virtues of conformity and traditionalism. Nothing could be further from the truth. Travers was a woman who never married, wore trousers when she felt like it, had a transformative and emotionally charged relationship with an older married man, and entered into a long-term live-in relationship with another woman. As she approached forty, she decided that she wanted a child. After a bizarre incident in which she attempted to adopt the seventeen-year-old girl who cleaned her house, she travelled to Ireland and adopted an infant, one of a pair of twins, and raised him as a single mother. Her reverence for the delights of family life was perhaps as intense as Disney's, but her opinion about the shape such a life might assume was far more nuanced. Children's authors are not known for their happy childhoods, and Helen Goff - the little girl who at twenty-one changed her name to Pamela Travers and never looked back - endured one that was almost archetypal in its sadness and its privations. She was born in Australia in 1899, the eldest daughter in a household of girls. Her father, Travers Goff, was a bank manager and a drinker, and he died when she was seven.... Her mother, Margaret, who was pretty and feckless, soldiered on for a few years, and then, when Helen was ten, she did what a mother is never supposed to do. She gave up. One night, in the middle of a thunderstorm, Margaret left Helen in charge of the two younger children, telling her that she was going to drown herself in a nearby creek. As an old woman, Travers wrote about the terrifying experience: 'Large-eyed, the little ones looked at me - she and I called them the little ones, both of us aware that an eldest child, no matter how young, can never experience the heart's ease that little ones enjoy.' Helen stirred the fire and then they all lay down on the hearth rug and she told them a story about a magical flying horse, with the small ones asking excited questions ('Could he carry us to the shiny land, all three on his back?'). As she tried to distract her siblings, she worried about the future. ... Margaret came back that night, having been unsuccessful in her suicide attempt, but Helen's mind was made up. She no longer cleaved to her unreliable, dithering mother but, rather, to a formidable maiden great-aunt, Helen Morehead. Aunt Ellie, as she was called, bossed everyone around, but her fierceness disguised a kindness she would have been embarrassed to admit. ... Obviously, Travers did not write her books to commemorate a happy childhood, but she did seem interested in rewriting her bad one. The Banks family is a reformed version of the Goffs, their charming features magnified and their failures burnished away. Father is a banker, although not a drunk; mother is a flibbertigibbet, although not a suicidal one. And Mary Poppins, like Aunt Ellie, is the great deflater, the enemy of any attempt at whimsy or sentiment.

One need not have been raised in Fresno to appreciate Saroyan, though I suppose it helps. Certainly he, better than anybody, captured the valley's strange texture: the mishmash landscape of farm, town and deserts; the jostling of so many different peoples, all a bit bewildered at finding themselves thrown together ... Certainly Fresnans never forgave Saroyan for his harsher observations about the old hometown. The more political Armenians complained he wasted too many words on the human comedy, and not enough on the tragedy of a lost homeland. That he wrote so personally, and from the heart, gave literary critics their target: He was, they scolded, an undisciplined sentimentalist, mawkish. ... For whatever reasons, Saroyan today is held under book-land quarantine. Few of his titles are in print. He's barely taught in schools. His own plans for literary legacy - a writers-in-residence program, posthumous publication of many works - have been scrapped or stalled. They did name a theater after him in Fresno, the one thing he expressly requested not be done. Those who remain under the Saroyan spell can only hope that the world will come around. His work simply seems too extraordinary, and universal, to be cleared from the shelves...

I say the time is ripe for a William Saroyan revival... Bill Saroyan, that rollicking elf of an author who knew well of irony and compassion and laughter, wrote first-class original works for television, and the adaptations of his plays invariably hit the mark. I am thinking now in particular of the Playhouse 90 production of 'The Time of Your Life.' In it Jackie Gleason delivered a tremendous portrayal as Joe the philosopher who had this wistful greeting for everyone who entered the bar: 'What's the dream?' ... In one of his last essays you may find a perceptive line that tells of the Saroyan working philosophy: 'The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it.' ... He looked, William Saroyan, exactly the way you would expect him to look. He had a huge mustache and a booming voice and a commanding presence. He was exuberant. He was mischievous. He was fun. ... How he could make the English language soar! His words danced. This was writing that was never inhabited by wallflowers. This was Bill Saroyan.

A Health, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Rose Hartwick Thorpe at famousamericans.net.

Idylls of the King

Yom Tov of Joigny

Conan the Barbarian

Measure for Measure

The Merchant of Venice