Real people are made out of a whole lot of things—flesh, bone, blood, nerves, stuff like that. Literary people are made out of words.
Now, Joyce being Joyce, he has about five different purposes, one not being enough for genius.
In order to remain undead, I must steal the life force of someone whose fate matters less to me than my own.' I've always supposed that Wall Street traders utter essentially the same sentence.
If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won't save it.
Rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.
The difference between being Achilles and almost being Achilles is the difference between living and dying.
What we mean when speaking of myth in general is story, the ability of story to explain ourselves to ourselves in ways that physics, philosophy, mathematics, chemistry—all very highly useful and infor...
Literary works are not democracies. We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal. We may, but the country of Novels, Etc., doesn't. In that faraway place, no charact...
The real reason for quest is always self-knowledge.
Memory. Symbol. Pattern. These are the three items that, more than any other, separate the professorial reader from the rest of the crowd.
History is story, too. You don't encounter her directly; you've only heard of her through narrative of one sort or another.
Reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer's alone.
Every language has a grammar, a set of rules that govern usage and meaning, and literary language is no different. It’s all more or less arbitrary of course, just like language itself.
Someone had to go first, show that there was a life to be recorded here, that this place, this new set of possibilities, could inspire a new literature. Cooper set the signpost on the road, and hearty...
Of his need to assert responsibility for his own life. It may be that Adela does panic in the face of Nothingness, only recovering herself when she takes responsibility by recanting in the witness box...
What happens if the writer is good is usually not that the work seems derivative or trivial but just the opposite: the work actually acquires depth and resonance from the echoes and chimes it sets up...
Everything is a symbol of something, it seems, until proven otherwise.
Education is mostly about institutions and getting tickets stamped; learning is what we do for ourselves. When we're lucky, they go together. If I had to choose, I'd take learning.
Don't wait for writers to be dead to be read; the living ones can use the money.
We love the plays, the great characters, the fabulous speeches, the witty repartee even in times of duress. I hope never to be mortally stabbed, but if I am, I'd sure like to have the self-possession,...
Showing 1 to 20 of 55 results