Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers — such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.
I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances — from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime.
But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer’s pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.
For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
Who might succeed in impressing upon a bigoted, stubborn human creature the distant joy and grief of others, an understanding of dimensions and deceptions which he himself has never experienced? Propaganda, constraint, scientific proof — all are useless. But fortunately there does exist such a means in our world! That means is art. That means is literature. They can perform a miracle: they can overcome man's detrimental peculiarity of learning only from personal experience so that the experience of other people passes him by in vain. From man to man, as he completes his brief spell on Earth, art transfers the whole weight of an unfamiliar, lifelong experience with all its burdens, its colours, its sap of life; it recreates in the flesh an unknown experience and allows us to possess it as our own.
Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against "freedom of print", it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another.
Anyone who has once taken up the WORD can never again evade it.
And literature, as one of the most sensitive, responsive instruments possessed by the human creature, has been one of the first to adopt, to assimilate, to catch hold of this feeling of a growing unity of mankind. And so I turn with confidence to the world literature of today — to hundreds of friends whom I have never met in the flesh and whom I may never see.
I believe that world literature has it in its power to help mankind, in these its troubled hours, to see itself as it really is, notwithstanding the indoctrinations of prejudiced people and parties. World literature has it in its power to convey condensed experience from one land to another so that we might cease to be split and dazzled, that the different scales of values might be made to agree, and one nation learn correctly and concisely the true history of another with such strength of recognition and painful awareness as it had itself experienced the same, and thus might it be spared from repeating the same cruel mistakes.
My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure.
There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them.
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
When you make friends with a long-dead philosopher, you don’t think of them in a detached, objective manner. That is, we better understand where they are coming from, and why they hold certain views.
I am heir of all the ages - heir of their wealth of thought and high endeavor.
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root...
The heights by great men reached and kept, Were not attained by sudden flight, But they, while their companions slept, Were toiling upward in the night.
...The moral tide of society is seldom altered by grand institutions, such as governments, religions and economic systems. Those things are too unwieldy and too wedded to the status quo. Great moral change is usually brought about by the vibrant voice of a visionary...And more often than not, that one visionary person will be carrying a pen, or a movie camera, or a microphone.
I have met enough people I don't like in my life to have a fairly shrewd idea of what I want my baddies to be like.
Children have not yet built wide hinterlands: to them, the world is still opaque and full of necessary bewilderment. Those who write for children have the chance to point them towards beauty that they do not yet know exists: towards versions of joy that they have not yet imagined possible.
In being written for those to whom the world is new and strange, for those who are without economic power, and for those who need short, sharp, bold stories, children’s literature can be a form of distillation: of what it means to hope, to fear, to yearn, distilled down and down into a piece of concentrated meaning.
All children grow up: those who write for children need, therefore, to write fiction that will speak to them both now and in their future.
What else did I long for as a child? I wanted action. I wanted characters brought right to the very edge of themselves.
Yet the thing I longed for most in children’s books were stories that would salute the reader’s intelligence...
For more than three thousand years we have been inventing mythical creatures, but the reason we have done so is less clear. One theory is that we built creatures to match the inexplicable remains we found. The Indigenous American mythological beast, the Thunder Bird, may well have stemmed from T-Rex skeletons.
There are books that give you nothing except relentless battles, didactic hectoring or crass sentimentalism – but then there are many very bad songs, and it does not turn us off the concept of music. There are many bad dinners, but it does not turn us off the concept of feasting.
The greatest children’s fantasies were worth your time when you were twelve, and they are equally worth it now. They keep the imagination sharp, and big, and hungry. They remind us that the imagination is not an optional extra, which we can humour in our children but safely discard in adulthood.
Resistance and change often begin in art.
The great books beckon us to a road upward.
Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here? That depends a good deal on where you want to get to, said the Cat. I don't much care where - said Alice. Then it doesn't matter which way you go, said the Cat. -so long as I get somewhere, Alice added as an explanation. Oh, you're sure to do that, said the Cat, if you only walk long enough.
Do you ever wonder what makes a great book great? To begin with, great books offer a higher level of language, characterization, and insight than average books, along with a quality of timelessness that makes them relevant to readers in any age...A great book is designed to change your mind, touch your heart, and lift your spirit. You should emerge from the experience of reading with some new wisdom about the human condition and a deeper perspective about the experiences of your own life.
Serious reading is not a passive activity; it is more like hiking or running, and it is rewarding in the same way. Harold Bloom calls it a "difficult pleasure." As with a long run or a challenging hike, one has to invest a lot of effort in a great book. The vocabulary may be unfamiliar, the imagery confusing, and the length of the book may call for a large commitment of time. Such a book asks a lot of you, but offers in return the same thrill you feel when you reach the top of the mountain or finish that marathon. The “high” one experiences after a great read is comparable to the “high” one experiences after a great run. It’s worth the effort!
Every great book changes your life in some way, and a lifetime of reading great books can alter the course of your life.
A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.
I always thought I could write because I loved to read so much.
Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage.
These books ain't window dressing. I think Machiavelli's the most sophisticated writer outside of Shakespeare. Way ahead of his time. Such a manipulative person. Everything he accomplished he did by kissin' ass.
I like the hip writers: Fitzgerald, the guy who committed suicide, Hemingway, all those guys. Some of them were alcoholics and drug addicts but they had fun. They were real people. They formed the culture of American literature. Hemingway admired Tolstoy, Tolstoy admired Pushkin, and Mailer admired Hemingway. It all flows down. The greats are all connected. One day I'm gonna write a book myself. The first chapter will be about what a rough deal my momma got. She believed in you guys and your society.
Shyamalan wrote some dialogue for a birthday party - a turning point, though it never made it to the screen - where the sensitive kid and a chubby kid are just sitting there, friendless and ostracized. The sensitive kid tells the chubby kid, "My mom said God made some of us different, knowing that it'd be hard. But he picked the people who would be different really carefully." Then the sensitive kid leans forward to the chubby kid: "God thinks we’re strong."... "I was only 10," says Haley Joel Osment, "but I could tell it was amazing writing."...I ask why Manoj ever stopped calling himself Manoj. "You are pronouncing it so well," his mother says, sweetly. (It’s Ma-noge.) She says that Shyamalan's teachers used to mangle it, so when he was a teenager he came up with Night. His father tells me that his son always felt a kinship with the Native Americans, and that the word resonated for them because the elders told their children stories around the fire in the evening and because you can see the universe only at night.
The fault was mine. The page of life that was spread out before me seemed dull and commonplace, only because I had not fathomed its deeper import.
Stories should be told for a reason...If you dispense your own wisdom, others often dismiss it. If you offer wisdom from a third party it seems less arrogant and more acceptable.
Our doubts are traitors and make us loose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt. Measure for Measure ActI.Sc.5
Strong reasons make strong actions.
He is well paid That is well satisfied.
Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
The Magic Bag. It’s a familiar storytelling device. Ask the bag for something, anything, whatever you might want—and poof, out it pops. We find variations in myths and fables, in jokes, in numerous Twilight Zone episodes. The genie in a bottle. The monkey’s paw. The holodeck on the USS Enterprise. The moral of the story, as often as not, turns out to be: Be careful what you wish for. By giving us what we thought we wanted, the Magic Bag instructs us on the danger of having one’s desires fulfilled, reminding us that it is often better to want than to get.
If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the know-nothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.
One always speaks badly when one has nothing to say.
It is with books as with the fire in our hearths; we go to a neighbor to get the embers and light it when we return home, pass it on to others, and it belongs to everyone.
Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable.
Books, like conversation, rarely give us any precise ideas: nothing is so common as to read and converse unprofitably. We must here repeat what Locke has so strongly urged—Define your terms.
Define your terms, you will permit me again to say, or we shall never understand one another.
There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island and at the bottom of the Spanish Main... and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.
The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known.
Reading after a certain age diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
The covers of this book are too far apart.
But he that dare not grasp the thorn Should never crave the rose.
Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.
I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.
Readers are plentiful, thinkers are rare.
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
Happy are those who dream dreams, and are willing to pay the price to make them reality.
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts; but so to love wisdom as to live by its dictates.
The worth of a book is what you can carry away from it.
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
I have read your book and much like it.
All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
To thine ownself be true then canst thou be false to any man.
We must not stint our necessary actions, in the fear to cope malicious censurers. Henry VIII ACT 1 SC.2
When a wise man gives thee better counsel, give me mine again. King Lear Act II Sc. 1
An old man is twice a child. Hamlet Act II Sc.2
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!
Take all the swift advantage of the hours.
I am at war twixt will and will not.
There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in misery.
Lawless are they that maketh their wills their law.
Tis better to be lowly born, And range with humble livers in content,Than to be perk'd up in a glittering grief, And wear a golden sorrow. Henry VIII Act II Sc. 3
He jests at scars that never felt a wound.
I feel within me A peace above all earthly dignities A still and quiet conscience.
God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.
Everyone can master a grief but he that has it.
Death lies on her, like an untimely frost Upon the sweetest flower of all the field. Romeo and Juliet. Act 1V Sc. 5
All that glitters is not gold. Merchant of Venice ActII. Sc.7
Modest doubt is call'd The Beacon of the wise.
O, cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint, With saints dost bait thy hook! Measure for Measure ActII Sc.4
Violent fires soon burn out themselves; Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short. Richard II Act. II Sc. 1
How far your eyes may pierce, I cannot tell; Striving to better, oft we mar what's well. King Lear Act I. Sc. 4
You have such a February face, So full of frost, of storm, and cloudiness.
He lives in fame that died in virtues cause.
Go to your bosom; knock there; and ask your heart what it doth know. Measure for Measure Act II Sc. 2
They say, best men are molded out of faults; And, for the most, become much more the better For being a little bad: so may my husband. Measure for Measure Act V Sc. 1
Was ever feather so lightly blown to and fro, as tis multitude? Henry VI Act. IV sc. 8
THIRD FISHERMAN: Master I marvel how the fishes live in the sea. FIRST FISHERMAN: Why, as men do a-land: the great ones eat up the little ones. Pericles Act II Sc. 1
The empty vessel makes the greatest sound.
Have more than thou showest, speak less than thou knowest.
This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.
We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.
Great blunders are often made, like large ropes, of a multitude of fibers.
Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do.
Habit rules the unreflecting herd.
Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers — such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.
Missing Reference