Books Quote by Carol Bly

Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits…

— Northrop Frye

Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.

— Paula Fox

“The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.”

— Charles Simic

I think the job of writing and literature is to encourage each one of us to believe that we're living in a story.

— Naomi Shihab Nye

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her…

— Jeanette Winterson

Reality deals in specifics under the guise of generalities. Literature does the contrary...

— Alberto Manguel

Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an…

— Philip Roth

Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.

— William Stafford

No literature is sound, no philosophy of action workable, if it doesn't take a hard look at itself.

— John W. Campbell

Literature is about telling stories.

— Amos Oz

Literature has as one of its principal allures that it tells you something about life that life itself can't tell you. I just thought…

— Richard Ford

Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.

— Paul de Man