Quotes on Literature

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit an harmonious design or an inspirational tone.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Way before Watergate, senior administration officials hid behind anonymity.

A reporter's ability to keep the bond of confidentiality often enables him to learn the hidden or secret aspects of government.

The being cannot be termed rational or virtuous, who obeys any authority, but that of reason.

Whatever is powerful to you can be translated into something which will matter to somebody that you will never know.

Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.

I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of confusion.

Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.

I don't read reviews because by then it's too late - whatever anyone says, the book won't change. It is written.

There are so many separate selves; no one who writes creatively hasn't felt that.

What you risk reveals what you value.

You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so, how could we take it back without asking?

But I also think all of the great stories in literature deal with loneliness. Sometimes it's by way of heartbreak, sometimes it's by way of injustice, sometimes it's by way of fate. There's an infinite number of ways to examine it.

We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.

That is my major preoccupation, memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.

Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.

Life is always either; a tight -rope or a feather-bed . — Give me the tightrope.

We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century - for several centuries.