“He gave it its present name, and lived here shut up: day and night poring over the wicked heaps of papers in… — Charles Dickens Copy Share Image
Even those who identify themselves as libertarians follow an overtly anti-rationalist philosophy, as even a brief acquaintance with the work of Friedrich… — Philip E. Agre Copy Share Image
“The books we love offer a sketch of a whole universe that we secretly inhabit, and in which we desire the other… — Pierre Bayard Copy Share Image
Life is very full of sex, or should be. As much as I admire Tolkien - and I do, he was a… — George R. R. Martin Copy Share Image
We do literature a real disservice if we reduce it to knowledge or to use, to a problem to be solved. If… — Marjorie Garber Copy Share Image
To accept the story of the Arab destruction of the library of Alexandria, one must explain how it is that so dramatic… — Bernard Lewis Copy Share Image
Literature is the best way to overcome death. My father, as I said, is an actor. He's the happiest man on earth… — Ilan Stavans Copy Share Image
“A stubborn refusal of the conditions of 20th Century 'reality', surrealism has denied intransigently and consistently that modern man can live without… — Michael Richardson Copy Share Image
I am interested in Scripture and theology. This is an interest that I can assume I would share with a pastor, so… — Marilynne Robinson Copy Share Image
My impression was and is that many programming languages and tools represent solutions looking for problems, and I was determined that my… — Bjarne Stroustrup Copy Share Image
Nothing detains the reader's attention more powerfully than deep involutions of distress, or sudden vicissitudes of fortune; and these might be abundantly… — Samuel Johnson Copy Share Image
The movie Fifty Shades of Grey is considerably better written than the book. It is also sort of classy-looking, in a generic,… — Lisa Schwarzbaum Copy Share Image
There's no reason - not yet, anyway - to believe [Bob] Dylan himself endorses such an attitude; or that he would think… — David Bennun Copy Share Image
Do not expect to be hailed as a hero when you make your great discovery. More likely you will be a ratbag-maybe… — Samuel Warren Carey Copy Share Image
I have felt the pain that arises from a recognition of beauty, pain we hold when we remember what we are connected… — Terry Tempest Williams Copy Share Image
My own duty as a teacher...is not so much to interpret Beethoven, Wagner, or other masters of the past, but to give… — Antonin Dvorak Copy Share Image
The second suggestion is to think as well as to read. I know people who read and read, and for all the… — Arnold Bennett Copy Share Image
“A page of a book is like a human face. Look at a page by Hemingway and compare it with Sterne and… — Stefan Themerson Copy Share Image
I have nothing but great respect for great scholars. But I was in grad school in the '80s and '90s, at the… — Daniel Mendelsohn Copy Share Image
“Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished,' 'problem-free,' fiction over which Writing-Program pre- and proscriptions loom… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
It is the specialist's task to talk about means, about centimeters. An artist's task is to talk about the goal, about kilometers,… — Yevgeny Zamyatin Copy Share Image
A principal aim of education is to give students a taste for literature, for the books of life and power, and to… — John Lancaster Spalding Copy Share Image
“He believes that if talent is demanded of a literary publisher or a writer, it must also be demanded of a reader.… — Enrique Vila-Matas Copy Share Image
“[Giordano] Bruno died, despised and suffering, after eight years of agony. From that moment, his works have attracted interest, and he has… — Dorothea Singer Copy Share Image
In my work I now have the comfortable feeling that I am so to speak on my own ground and territory and… — Heinrich Hertz Copy Share Image
“The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in ones own home." Most great works of the imagination were… — azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without… — Barbara Tuchman Copy Share Image
In the circle where I was raised, I knew of no one knowledgeable in the visual arts, no one who regularly attended… — Shirley Hazzard Copy Share Image
I studied Comparative Literature at Cornell. Structuralism was real big then. The idea of reading and writing as being this language game.… — William T. Vollmann 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
A popular feel for scientific endeavors should, if possible, be restored given the needs of the twenty-first century. This does not mean… — Walter Isaacson Copy Share Image
This propaganda of dis-associating Western Negroes from Africa is not a new one. For many years white propagandists have been printing tons… — Marcus Garvey Copy Share Image
The natural sciences are sometimes said to have no concern with values, nor to seek morality and goodness, and therefore belong to… — Cyril Norman Hinshelwood Copy Share Image
Metaphor isn't just a fancy turn of speech. It shapes our thoughts and feelings, reaches out to grasp new experience, and even… — James Richardson Copy Share Image
Christendom never came from an unbroken grave. It would have been buried in that grave, as Judas thought it was going to… — Richard Salter Storrs Copy Share Image
The book it reminded me of most is Henry Miller’s The Books in My Life. Like Miller, Shields manages to convey his… — Andre Alexis Copy Share Image
I see a lot of people who have amazing stories but have been told that their work, their lives, and their stories… — Faith Adiele Copy Share Image
To my mind, nothing is as important as good writing, because in literature, the walls between people and cultures are broken down,… — Richard Bausch Copy Share Image
Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which… — George Eliot 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