#liter

The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. ↗

— W. G. Sebald

#backbone #chance #clear #greater #happy

In fact I don't think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you're born is simply an accident of fate. I don't see why I shouldn't be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn't born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human. ↗

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

#european-novelists #literary-tradition #literature-in-translation #art

A lot of the time writers are just sponges... for what's around them, and so books are helpful for focusing your mind and literally putting it into words. ↗

— Marcus Mumford

#books #focusing #helpful #into #just

Although there is a very large literature, still growing almost daily, on the Chinese calendar, its interest is, we suggest, much more archaeological and historical than scientific. ↗

— Joseph Needham

#although #archaeological #calendar #chinese #daily

If the relation of morality to art were based simply on the demand that art be concerned with values, then almost every author should satisfy it even if he wrote with his prick while asleep. (Puritans will object to the language in that sentence, and feminists to the organ, and neither will admire or even notice how it was phrased.) ↗

— William H. Gass

#art

On almost anything someone does in the computer business, you can go back in the literature and prove someone had done it earlier. ↗

— Ken Olsen

#anything #back #business #computer #does

In my early teens, I heard about Naked Lunch and its mutating typewriters and talking cockroaches. While I would hardly classify its dystopic vision as erotica now, at the time, Naked Lunch was my first foray into consuming smut. It was because of Burroughs that I knew about the particular musk that blooms when a rectum is penetrated, and that death-by-hanging produces spontaneous trouser tents. The first Burroughs I read was Naked Lunch, but I buried myself in a few of his stories, and thus the arc of my recollection is just as non-linear as his narrative. ↗

— Peter Dubé

#coming-of-age #erotica #homosexuality #literature #queer

Mr. Darwin contributes some striking and ingenious instances of the way in which the principle partially affects the chain, or rather network of life, even to the total obliteration of certain meshes. ↗

— Richard Owen

#certain #chain #contributes #darwin #even

A man [Joyce] whose earliest stories appeared next to the manure prices in the Irish Homestead knew that columns of prose, like columns of shit, could both recultivate the earth. ↗

— Declan Kiberd

#james-joyce #joyce #literature #ulysses #art

The idea of bringing young people up to Literature is doubtless calculated to raise the eyebrows almost as much as the suggestion of bringing them up to the Stage. ↗

— James Payn

#bringing #calculated #doubtless #eyebrows #idea