“The ‘Muse’ is not an artistic mystery, but a mathematical equation. The gift are those ideas you think of as you drift… — Roman Payne Copy Share Image
While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them… — Anonymous Copy Share Image
We think of the romance novel as a lesser form of literature, but I don't think that's true. Love is a very… — Mohsin Hamid Copy Share Image
Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and… — A. E. Housman Copy Share Image
When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than… — James Earl Jones Copy Share Image
Work! labor the asparagus me of life; the one great sacrament of humanity from which all other things flow - security, leisure,… — Sean O'Casey Copy Share Image
Literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on, a value… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
Psychology teaches us at every step that though two types of activity can have the same external manifestation, whether in origin or… — Lev S. Vygotsky Copy Share Image
I am persuaded that without knowledge of literature pure theology cannot at all endure. . . . When letters have declined and… — Martin Luther Copy Share Image
The orphan in children's literature allows the child protagonist to move the story forward themselves. I think that, however happy a family,… — Brian Selznick Copy Share Image
“When was the last time an American president found it worth his while to write a speech on the importance of art… — Viet Thanh Nguyen Copy Share Image
Sex is the ... tremulous and bewildering and nerve-racking and delicious and myriad-adjectived soul-condition ... generally known as love. Ninety-nine point nine… — William John Locke Copy Share Image
Just in higher education alone, more people go to college now, by enormous amounts, than went to college in the '50's and… — Louis Menand Copy Share Image
I this day was spectator of the most magnificent Triumph that certainly ever floted on the Thames, considering the innumerable number of… — John Evelyn Copy Share Image
There is nothing “still” in the remarkably visceral poems of Alexander Long's third collection, Still Life, and nothing is at rest in… — David St. John Copy Share Image
Héctor Tobar's accomplished first novel affords a perspective that is overdue and urgently needed in North American literature- -an insider's vision of… — Stuart Dybek Copy Share Image
“Only if I knew that knowing it would bring a burden I could seldom carry and ferry among those I know, only… — Alok Mishra Copy Share Image
Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
I'm very aware of how much movies, literature and art affect culture. They are a reflection of the world around us and… — David Oyelowo Copy Share Image
Job is perhaps the oldest piece of literature known to man. How did Job know the Earth is suspended in space? Job… — Adrian Rogers Copy Share Image
Language as a communication tool is the primary element from which literature is created. Even in pre-literate societies, it exists as songs,… — F. Sionil Jose Copy Share Image
Jim said that bees won't sting idiots, but I didn't believe that, because I tried them lots of times myself and they… — Mark Twain Copy Share Image
The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for… — Vaclav Havel Copy Share Image
Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the… — Shirley Hazzard Copy Share Image
This may be said for the last quarter of the twentieth century: the truism that if we want a better world we… — Tom Robbins Copy Share Image
The gift of literature is that, in some lucky cases, reading a novel or a story makes the reader more curious, more… — Amos Oz Copy Share Image
From my earliest days, reading was my passion, and at Cambridge, where I studied English literature, my intellectual life deepened and grew. — Miriam Margolyes Copy Share Image
“It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Too often students are being taught to read as if literature were some kind of ethics class or civics class—or worse, some… — Francine Prose Copy Share Image
With Dick Smith there, and the words of Peter Shaffer... they've got to be the most beautiful descriptions in music ever written… — F. Murray Abraham Copy Share Image
This is the harsh truth about us: not only do Filipinos ignore books, literature - we do not understand how important the… — F. Sionil Jose Copy Share Image
When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today,… — Maya Angelou Copy Share Image
When people ask me to define science fiction and fantasy I say they are the literatures that explore the fact that we… — Nalo Hopkinson Copy Share Image
Here we are in the century of information, that is to say the unformed. Every kind of literature will be journalistic, with… — Julien Torma Copy Share Image
It is reasonable to assume that, by and large, what is not read now will not be read, ever. It is also… — Gore Vidal Copy Share Image
I believe that by releasing "passing interest/low keepsake-value literature" from the burden of physicality, you are actually releasing the words from their… — John Hodgman Copy Share Image
“On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
I graduated college valedictorian, got an M.A. from Columbia University in Spanish literature at the age of twenty-two, and still couldn't answer… — Jedediah Bila Copy Share Image
The highly complex, almost mathematical, nature of music creates for it an ironclad protection against the microbes of dilletantism, which penetrate much… — Yevgeny Zamyatin Copy Share Image
“Experience, then, was something that enabled you to do nothing with a clear conscience. Experience was an overrated quality.” — Nick Hornby Copy Share Image
