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.
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...
If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won't save it.
Rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.
The real reason for quest is always self-knowledge.
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.
The difference between being Achilles and almost being Achilles is the difference between living and dying.
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...
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.
We sometimes hear of the death of literature or of this or that genre, but literature doesn't die, just as it doesn't 'progress' or 'decay.' It expands, it increases. When we feel that it has become s...
Reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer's alone.
History is story, too. You don't encounter her directly; you've only heard of her through narrative of one sort or another.
Don't wait for writers to be dead to be read; the living ones can use the money.
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.
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...
Compelled belief is no belief at all.
Everything is a symbol of something, it seems, until proven otherwise.
Don't read with your eyes.