#literature

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another. ↗

— George Saunders

#answers #bad #bet #cruel #declines

A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect. ↗

— Walter Scott

#call #himself #history #knowledge #lawyer

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance. ↗

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

#becomes #begins #between #death #emotion

The Booker thing was a catalyst for me in a bizarre way. It’s perceived as an accolade to be published as a ‘literary’ writer, but, actually, it’s pompous and it’s fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself. I’d always read omnivorously and often thought much literary fiction is read by young men and women in their 20s, as substitutes for experience. ↗

— Neil Cross

#literary-fiction #literature #writers #writing #experience

Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use. ↗

— Ezra Pound

#definite #does #exactly #exist #function

And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature. ↗

— Jerry Pournelle

#bought #down #entertaining #great #great literature

The most watched programme on the BBC, after the news, is probably 'Doctor Who.' What has happened is that science fiction has been subsumed into modern literature. There are grandparents out there who speak Klingon, who are quite capable of holding down a job. No one would think twice now about a parallel universe. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#after #bbc #been #capable #doctor

It seems to me that an author who has determined very new domains in literature is Gertrude Stein. ↗

— Raymond Queneau

#determined #domains #gertrude #gertrude stein #literature

We shall suffer no attachment to literature, no taste for abstract discussion, no love of purely intellectual theories, to seduce us from our devotion to the cause of the oppressed, the down trodden, the insulted and injured masses of our fellow men. ↗

— George Ripley

#attachment #cause #devotion #discussion #down

It began in mystery and it will end in mystery, but what a rare and beautiful country lies in between. ↗

— Diane Ackerman

#beauty