Buttons Quote by Teju Cole

“Political activists rarely like fiction of any kind. Literature is about ambiguity, mixed emotions, and guilty pleasures. Politics is about ideals and action.”

— Christopher Bram

If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.

— V. S. Naipaul

“I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful - nonfiction only, please.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

“The obsession with past trauma refracts World Lit’s sense of belatedness, even when the genre advertises its contemporaneity. You can argue that we’re still…

— The editors n+1

I certainly do not adore the writer's discipline. I have lost lovers, endangered friendships, and blundered into eccentricity, impelled by a concentration which usually…

— Maya Angelou

In the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to…

— John Berger

There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists...Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner…

— Don DeLillo

Novelists go about the strenuous business of marrying and burying their people, or else they send them to sea, or to Africa, or at…

— Cynthia Ozick

The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local…

— Renata Adler

Holding this book in your hand, sinking back in your soft armchair, you will say to yourself: perhaps it will amuse me. And after…

— Honore de Balzac

“The author is not impartial. Dystopia is not tragedy.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

In a democracy in the 20th and 21st century, if you can't base your fiction upon ordinary people and the issues that engage them,…

— John Updike