Quotes on Literature

The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

I think you have to be yourself, and you have to be real and you have to admit what you don't know, and talk about what you do know, and talk about what you don't know as long as you say you don't know it.

I once asked a hermit in Italy how he could venture to live alone, in a single cottage, on the top of a mountain, a mile from any habitation? He replied, that Providence was his next-door neighbor.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.

Moderation is the inseparable companion of wisdom, but with it genius has not even a nodding acquaintance.

True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.

Literature exists so that where one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterward live finely

I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.

So in our pride we ordered for breakfast an omelet, toast and coffee and what has just arrived is a tomato salad with onions, a dish of pickles, a big slice of watermelon and two bottles of cream soda.

Children make your life important.

Literature taught me that I wasn't alone, that I could become a writer if I worked at it, that my story mattered. Whether a young reader becomes a writer or not, they deserve to know that their story, whatever it may be, is important.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

What does the truth matter? Haven't we mothers all given our sons a taste for lies, lies which from the cradle upwards lull them, reassure them, send them to sleep: lies as soft and warm as a breast!

Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.

Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation.

An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.

Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.

Nations are born in the hearts of poets, they prosper and die in the hands of politicians.

Here let dead poetry rise once more to life.

There is an hour wherein a man might be happy all his life, could he find it.