“Reading lives is the primary activity. Reading literature, although we engage in it more intentionally and more mindfully, is the secondary one.… — William L. Randall Copy Share Image
It's been suggested that most women fail to write significantly because the female mind is viscerotonic, and occupied almost exclusively with the… — Alfred Bester Copy Share Image
Is it strange, then, that in a literature so concerned with realism and with personal liberation this refusal and impoverishment of the… — Alfred Kazin Copy Share Image
“Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
Editors can be stupid at times. They just ignore that author's intention. I always try to read unabridged editions, so much is… — Anonymous Copy Share Image
“Though it's true that (dictionary-maker Samuel) Johnson sometimes seem to feel that the language was in decline, he didn't rail against it… — Robert Lane Greene Copy Share Image
I don't think literature would be possible in a determined world. We might go through the motions but the heart would be… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“We have no time to waste on insignificant books, hollow books, books that are there to please... We want books that cost… — Laurence Cossé Copy Share Image
“Moreover, it is not just that the early documents are silent about so much of Jesus that came to be recorded in… — George Albert Wells Copy Share Image
I live to the rhythm of my country and I cannot remain on the sidelines. I want to be here. I want… — Elena Poniatowska Copy Share Image
“I would read accounts of so-called battles I had been in, and they had no relation whatever to what had happened. So… — Paul Fussell Copy Share Image
“All the while that Jean was listening to him, he was vaguely conscious that what gives literature its reality is the result… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
Like morality, literature needs to be universal. So that the writer must put himself on the side of the majority, of the… — Jean-Paul Sartre Copy Share Image
A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of… — Anthony Burgess Copy Share Image
Intern is not just a gripping tale of becoming a doctor. It's also a courageous critique, a saga of an immigrant family… — Melvin Konner Copy Share Image
In order to write about the machine you have to know it, to live with it, to love it (or hate it).… — Yevgeny Zamyatin Copy Share Image
Nearly all literature, in one sense, is made up of guide-books. Old ones tell us the ways our fathers went, through the… — Herman Melville Copy Share Image
My novels are in the literature section as opposed to the romance section of bookstores because they're not romance novels. If I… — Nicholas Sparks Copy Share Image
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and… — Carl Jung Copy Share Image
“The fantastic in literature doesn't exist as a challenge to what is probable, but only there where it can be increased to… — Lars Gustafsson Copy Share Image
The word generalization in literature usually means covering too much territory too thinly to be persuasive, let alone convincing. In science, however,… — R. Buckminster Fuller Copy Share Image
Ninety-nine per cent of traditional English literature concerns people who never have to worry about money at all. We always seem to… — James Kelman Copy Share Image
It is my sincere hope that Christopher Bryson's apparently thorough and comprehensive perusal of the scientific literature on the biological actions of… — Arvid Carlsson Copy Share Image
Poetry and code - and mathematics - make us read differently from other forms of writing. Written poetry makes the silent reader… — Stephanie Strickland Copy Share Image
One is conscious of no brave and noble earnestness in it, of no generalized passion for intellectual and spiritual adventure, of no… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean?… — Ray Bradbury Copy Share Image
“This paying attention is the foundational act of empathy, of listening, of seeing, of imagining experiences other than one's own, of getting… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
There are companies like Facebook that wield tremendous power over how Americans understand the world. Do they have a social responsibility now?… — Haroon Moghul Copy Share Image
“Writers more interested in literature than the truth ensure that they never come out with either thing — one reason that the word literature… — The editors n+1 Copy Share Image
“We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find… — Christopher Hitchens Copy Share Image
My background isn't in social software; it's in online community, social networks, personal publishing, blogging, self-expression on the Web. I got on… — Caterina Fake Copy Share Image
“Let me tell you something. You won't mind, will you? Don't have scenes with your young ladies. Try not to. Because you… — Ernest Hemingway Copy Share Image
If you say city to people, people have no problem thinking of the city as rife with problematic, screwed-up people, but if… — Eric Bogosian Copy Share Image
This is the road I have tried to follow as a teacher: living my convictions; being open to the process of knowing… — Paulo Freire Copy Share Image
“There is only one motive for writing a novel: to be published and read. To me there is no distinction between the… — John Franklin Bardin Copy Share Image
I'd studied English literature and American history, but the English literature, which I thought was going to be helpful to me in… — Lynne Tillman Copy Share Image
We will never know peace in the world without balance. And we will never know balance without justice for all. Yet, justice… — Suzy Kassem Copy Share Image
“An artist is the magician put among men to gratify--capriciously--their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him,… — Tom Stoppard Copy Share Image
In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was… — Terry Pratchett Copy Share Image
“Critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury the greatest work of imaginative fiction in English. They ignore it,… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
