All Quotes By Tag: Literature

“No, I am not imagining a book-burning, warmongering, anti-intellectual fascist regime – in my plan, there is no place for re ghters who light up the Homers and Lady Murasakis and Cao Xueqins stashed under your bed – because, for starters, I’m not banning literature per se. I’m banning the reading of literature. Purchasing and collecting books and other forms of literature remains perfectly legitimate as long as you don’t peruse the literature at hand.”

“Because of the earth’s roundness, Genghis Khan, in the fever of possession and destruction, hastened his own overthrow by invading lands that he had already razed and conquered. Not only is it impossible to know from where we come, but also from whom we come: nothing in common, in any case, with those who pass for being the “authors of our days” – which days? Better to invent a genealogy based on pure whim and the leanings of our hearts, but what if they don’t agree?”

“he best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a rule applicable as much to literary style as to life. Each word tugs another one along, one idea another, and that is how books, governments and revolutions are made – some even say that is how Nature created her species.”

“Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.”

“..the writer’s obsession – the desire to know and communicate, or, rather, to know everything so as to communicate with the greatest degree of precision.”

“Of course, they were other things too. Sometimes they were even everything all together, but not fame, which was rooted in delusion and lies, if not ambition. Also, fame was reductive. Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished. Fame’s message was unadorned. Fame and literature were irreconcilable enemies.”

“Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature is nevertheless only conceivable in terms of a desire for fundamental communication with the reader.”

“It’s my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I’ve written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don’t know.”

“The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author’s supervision swell gradually with the reader’s lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that – not very appetizing – food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries.”

“The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.”

“Literature is painting, architecture, and music.”

“Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart.”

“While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best.”

“I won’t stop writing until I am known as the Kurt Cobain of literature!”

“The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.”