Literary Quotes (page 5)
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He was already beginning to understand that what was wrong with his writing was that there was something wrong, something misconceived, about him. If he hadn't become the writer he thought he had it in him to be, it was because he didn't know who he was. And slowly, from his ignominious place at the bottom of the literary barrel, he began to understand who that person might be. He was a migrant. He was one of those who had ended up in a place that was not the place where he began.
Salman Rushdie
[Northrop] Frye was concerned mostly with literary criticism, and myths interested him as structural elements in works of literature. He used the word myth to mean story, without attaching any connotation of truth or falsehood to it; but a myth is a story of a certain kind. The myths of a culture are those stories it takes seriously—the ones that are thought to be a key to its identity.
Margaret Atwood
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end. There is not a piece of science, but its flank may be turned to-morrow; there is not any literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names of fame, that may not be revised and condemned. The very hopes of man, the thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the manner and morals of...
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I feel sick when I look at the parody synopsis, at the letters from the film company... The novel is 'about' a colour problem. I said nothing in it that wasn't true. But the emotion it came out of was something frightening, the unhealthy, feverish illicit excitement of wartime, a lying nostalgia, a longing for licence, for freedom, for the jungle, for formlessness. It is so clear to me that I can't read that novel now without feeling ashamed, as if I were in a street naked. Yet no one else...
Doris Lessing
Never in her life had she seen such literary men. They were incredibly vain, but made no secret of it, as though they were so on principle. Some (though by no means all) turned up drunk, but they seemed to regard it as some new manifestation of grace they had discovered only the day before. They all appeared to be quite extraordinarily proud of something. On all faces was written that they had only just discovered some highly important secret.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
That is one thing I am sure of amid my many uncertainties regarding the literary vocation: deep inside, a writer feels that writing is the best thing that ever happened to him, or could ever happen to him, because as far as he is concerned, writing is the best possible way of life, never mind the social, political, or financial rewards of what he might achieve through it.
Mario Vargas Llosa
