Quotes on Literature

There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.

Beware of him that is slow to anger; for when it is long coming, it is the stronger when it comes, and the longer kept. Abused patience turns to fury.

When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.

The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with it a tangible loss but also a total engagement that, on another level, lends the theater its unparalleled imperfection faced with the perfection of film. I don’t want to write anything but takes.

Extremes in nature equal ends produce; In man they join to some mysterious use.

Why I came here, I know not; where I shall go it is useless to inquire - in the midst of myriads of the living and the dead worlds, stars, systems, infinity, why should I be anxious about an atom?

No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.

The man whom God wills to slay in the struggle of life - he first individualizes.

I don't like work... but I like what is in work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - which no other man can ever know.

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

Just as the 99% of Soviet citizens who supported the Soviet regime in 1985 was no indication of what the people inside the USSR really thought, the army of true believers that we think we see in the Arab world is an illusion.

Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in mystery, we shall learn nothing.

Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.

It is not possible either to trick or escape the mind of Zeus.

Common sense is the genius of humanity.

To me all men are equal: there are jackasses everywhere, and I have the same contempt for them all.

I have become infected, now that I see how beautifully a book is coming out of all this.

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved.

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

Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.

Fanfiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don't do it for money. That's not what it's about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They're fans, but they're not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.