#literature

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

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

If you say city to people, people have no problem thinking of the city as rife with problematic, screwed-up people, but if you say suburbs - and I'm not the first person to say this, it's been said over and over again in literature - there's a sense of normalcy. ↗

— Eric Bogosian

#been #city #first #i #literature

I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly. ↗

— John le Carre

#anything #ask #be prepared #dali #diverse

Underground literature only began in the '70s, when technical developments made it possible. Before that, we were involved in a game with the censors. That was our struggle. ↗

— Ryszard Kapuscinski

#began #censors #developments #game #involved

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

I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature. ↗

— Leslie Fiedler

#american #because #become #force #had