Quotes on Literature

A God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but fate and nature.

Praise undeserved, is satire in disguise.

Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

The difference is too nice - Where ends the virtue or begins the vice.

By the time the people asking the questions are ready for the answers, the people doing the work have lost track of the questions.

I consciously try to end my novels at a point where I won't have to wonder about my characters ever again.

I can never tell ahead of time which book will give me trouble - some balk every step of the way, others seem to write themselves - but certainly the mechanics of writing, finding the time and the psychic space, are easier now that my children are grown.

The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.

People may believe that there can be a society where dissent is not permitted, but which is nonetheless not a fear society because everyone agrees with one another and therefore no one wants to dissent.

There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.

Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.

General benevolence, but not general friendship, made a man what he ought to be.

In talking with scholars, I observe that they lost on ruder companions those years of boyhood which alone could give imaginative literature a religious and infinite quality in their esteem.

Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.

The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.

It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.

Like works of literature, mathematical ideas help expand our circle of empathy, liberating us from the tyranny of a single, parochial point of view. Numbers, properly considered, make us better people.

One does not set fire to a world which is already lost

The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.

One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.

If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?