#liter

If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it. ↗

— Andrew Denton

#art #earth #even #greater #literature

Movies are too literal. ↗

— E. L. Doctorow

#movies #too

There's no room for being a visionary in the studio system. It literally cannot exist. ↗

— Shia LaBeouf

#cannot #exist #literally #room #studio

It is the growth of advertising in this country which, more than any single element, has brought the American magazine to its present enviable position in points of literary, illustrative and mechanical excellence. ↗

— Edward Bok

#american #any #brought #country #element

Sometimes it's literally just a feeling that you get that somebody is more interested than someone else; and they may both say they're interested, but you get a feeling. ↗

— John Badham

#else #feeling #get #interested #just

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century. ↗

— J. G. Ballard

#almost #becoming #century #everything #fiction

Life, of course, never gets anyone's entire attention. Death always remains interesting, pulls us, draws us. As sleep is necessary to our physiology, so depression seems necessary to our psychic economy. In some secret way, Thanatos nourishes Eros as well as opposes it. The two principles work in covert concert; though in most of us Eros dominates, in none of us is Thanatos completely subdued. However-and this is the paradox of suicide-to take one's life is to behave in a more active, assertive, "erotic" way than to helplessly watch as one's life is taken away from one by inevitable mortality. Suicide thus engages with both the death-hating and the death-loving parts of us: on some level, perhaps, we may envy the suicide even as we pity him. It has frequently been asked whether the poetry of Plath would have so aroused the attention of the world if Plath had not killed herself. I would agree with those who say no. The death-ridden poems move us and electrify us because of our knowledge of what happened. Alvarez has observed that the late poems read as if they were written posthumously, but they do so only because a death actually took place. "When I am talking about the weather / I know what I am talking about," Kurt Schwitters writes in a Dada poem (which I have quoted in its entirety). When Plath is talking about the death wish, she knows what she is talking about. In 1966, Anne Sexton, who committed suicide eleven years after Plath, wrote a poem entitled "Wanting to Die," in which these startlingly informative lines appear: But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. When, in the opening of "Lady Lazarus," Plath triumphantly exclaims, "I have done it again," and, later in the poem, writes, Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call, we can only share her elation. We know we are in the presence of a master builder. ↗

— Janet Malcolm

#art

On reaching the place where the Indians had surprised us, we found the bodies of the three men whom they had killed and scalped, and literally cut into pieces. ↗

— Buffalo Bill

#cut #found #had #indians #into

The genre has moved into this commercial aspect of itself, and ignored this extraordinarily rich literature that's filed everywhere else except under travel. ↗

— Robyn Davidson

#commercial #else #everywhere #except #extraordinarily

I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them. ↗

— Robertson Davies

#anyone #books #ever #heard #i