Quotes on Literature

People who have no hold over their process of thinking are likely to be ruined by liberty of thought. If thought is immature, liberty of thought becomes a method of converting men into animals.

Well, I write in exile because I cannot return to my country, so I have no choice but to see myself as an exiled writer.

One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands in the midst of the struggle and says, 'I have it,' merely shows by doing so that he has just lost it.

Look into any man's heart you please, and you will always find, in every one, at least one black spot which he has to keep concealed.

The majority is always wrong; the minority is rarely right.

Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.

The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.

Imaginative literature primarily pleases rather than teaches. It is much easier to be pleased than taught, but much harder to know why one is pleased. Beauty is harder to analyze than truth.

We did meet forty years ago. At that time we were both influenced by Whitman and I said, jokingly in part, 'I don't think anything can be done in Spanish, do you?' Neruda agreed, but we decided it was too late for us to write our verse in English. We'd have to make the best of a second-rate literature.

All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? ... Or does it explode?

There is something that is much more scarce, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.

Men are only as great as they are kind.

There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry.

Whether there is such a thing as Reality, of which the various levels are only partial aspects, or whether there are only levels, is something that literature cannot decide. Literature recognizes rather the *reality of the levels.*

The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.