#literature

I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term. ↗

— Robert Caro

#believe #clear #deepest #highest #history

Gore Vidal, for instance, once languidly told me that one should never miss a chance either to have sex or to appear on television. My efforts to live up to this maxim have mainly resulted in my passing many unglamorous hours on off-peak cable TV. It was actually Vidal's great foe William F. Buckley who launched my part-time television career, by inviting me on to Firing Line when I was still quite young, and giving me one of the American Right's less towering intellects as my foil. The response to the show made my day, and then my week. Yet almost every time I go to a TV studio, I feel faintly guilty. This is pre-eminently the 'soft' world of dream and illusion and 'perception': it has only a surrogate relationship to the 'hard' world of printed words and written-down concepts to which I've tried to dedicate my life, and that surrogate relationship, while it, too, may be 'verbal,' consists of being glib rather than fluent, fast rather than quick, sharp rather than pointed. It means reveling in the fact that I have a meretricious, want-it-both-ways side. My only excuse is to say that at least I do not pretend that this is not so. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#cable-television #cable-television-in-the-us #conservatism #conservatism-in-the-us #gore-vidal

American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World. ↗

— Christopher Dawson

#american #american literature #among #aspired #been

In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it. ↗

— Jacques Derrida

#already #begun #certain #dream #dreamed

First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory. ↗

— Mason Cooley

#first #itself #literary #literature #only

I didn't choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to the place. ↗

— Helen Dunmore

#been #choose #chose #culture #early

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist. ↗

— Harold Bloom

#believed #critic #criticism #does #exist

The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective. ↗

— Harold Bloom

#corrective #current #does #drab #either

What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering. ↗

— Harold Bloom

#end #flavor #human #human suffering #in the end

I was already devouring literature and I was the ripe old age of 15 when I decided to be an actor. I just thought plays were the most fantastic way of expressing life. I thought I'd discovered Shakespeare - 'hey, there's a new guy in town, don't know if anyone's read him.' I was just excited about the whole thing, from day one. ↗

— Chiwetel Ejiofor

#actor #age #already #anyone #day