Quotes on Literature

We were trained as writers with the idea that literature is something that can change reality, that it's not just a very sophisticated entertainment but a way to act.

Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but less by assimilation than by friction.

I write plays not to make money, but to stop myself from going mad. Because it's my way of making the world rational to me.

In the theatre we reach out and touch the past through literature, history and memory so that we might receive and relive significant and relevant human qualities in the present and then pass them on to future generations.

I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.

Children read to learn - even when they are reading fantasy, nonsense, light verse, comics or the copy on cereal packets, they are expanding their minds all the time, enlarging their vocabulary, making discoveries - it is all new to them.

My hapless peers with their lofty dreams--how I envy and despise them! I'm with the others, the even more hapless, who have no-one but themselves to whom they can tell their dreams and show what would be verses if they wrote them. I'm with those poor slobs who have no books to show, who have no literature beside their own soul, and who are suffocating to death due to the fact that they exist without having taken that mysterious, transcendental exam that makes one eligible to live.

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.

This is slavery, not to speak one's thought.

Future. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.

And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.

The problem with literature, with writing, is that it works sometimes in terms of correction of social ills. Other times, it just does not suffice.

People who can't be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.

It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.

The world of science and the world of literature have much in common. Each is an international club, helping to tie mankind together across barriers of nationality, race and language. I have been doubly lucky, being accepted as a member of both.

Peace is rarely denied to the peaceful.

What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?

Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly.

I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.

I belong to Russian literature, but I am an American citizen, and I think it's the best possible combination.

Two aged men, that had been foes for life, Met by a grave, and wept - and in those tears They washed away the memory of their strife; Then wept again the loss of all those years.