Quotes on Literature

I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large.

In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet

In literature, you know only what you imagine

My theory is that literature is essential to society in the way that dreams are essential to our lives. We can't live without dreaming - as we can't live without sleep. We are 'conscious' beings for only a limited period of time, then we sink back into sleep - the 'unconscious.' It is nourishing, in ways we can't fully understand.

His headstone said FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST But death is a slave's freedom We seek the freedom of free men And the construction of a world Where Martin Luther King could have lived and preached nonviolence.

It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.

Thrillers are like life, more like life than you are.

If we don't have an informed electorate we don't have a democracy. So I don't care how people get the information, as long as they get it. I'm just doing it my particular way and I feel lucky I can do it the way I want to do it.

There is a beauty in nature and culture that we no longer have access to. Those things you can't forget, you embroider... The further you tell, the further you travel from truth, which means, of course, that literature is a lie.

Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.

The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

the whole purport of literature...is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.

The central dilemma in journalism is that you don't know what you don't know.

The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.

For me, life without literature is inconceivable. I think that Don Quixote in a physical sense never existed, but Don Quixote exists more than anybody who existed in 1605. Much more. There's nobody who can compete with Don Quixote or with Hamlet. So in the end we have the reality of the book as the reality of the world and the reality of history.

If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.

I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.

Literature is the only access to truth we have on this planet.

It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver - because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator - a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.