Quotes on Literature

I can only speak for myself. But what I write and how I write is done in order to save my own life. And I mean that literally. For me literature is a way of knowing that I am not hallucinating, that whatever I feel/know is.

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.

The world is bad but not without hope. It is only hopeless when you look at it from an ideal viewpoint.

Friends... they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.

People don't want other people to get high, because if you get high, you might see the falsity of the fabric of the society we live in.

I’m just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it recreates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, it’s far closer to the miraculous creation of life than, say, a painting or music or even literature. It’s not just an art form; it’s actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies. It’s my way of telling a story.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

Jim said that bees won't sting idiots, but I didn't believe that, because I tried them lots of times myself and they wouldn't sting me.

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

They who have conquered doubt and fear have conquered failure.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.

Literature is inexhaustible, with every book a homage to infinity

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

I have the same confidence in the ability of our people to reject noxious literature as I have in their capacity to sort out the true from the false in theology, economics, or any other field.

What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?