#literature

I was glad my father was an eye-smiler. It meant he never gave me a fake smile because it's impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren't feeling twinkly yourself. A mouth-smile is different. You can fake a mouth-smile any time you want, simply by moving your lips. I've also learned that a real mouth-smile always has an eye-smile to go with it. So watch out, I say, when someone smiles at you but his eyes stay the same. It's sure to be a phony. ↗

— Roald Dahl

#dahl #danny-the-champion-of-the-world #fiction #father

Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other ↗

— Anton Chekhov

#medicine #medicine

Nor shall this peace sleep with her; but as when The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix, Her ashes new-create another heir As great in admiration as herself. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#drama #english-literature #drama

I asked my publisher what would happen if he sold all the copies of my book he'd printed. He said "I'll just print another ten. ↗

— Eric Sykes

#literature #literature-quotes

What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons; we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless 'Why?' and 'What next?' ("Literature, Revolution, and Entropy") ↗

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

#fearsome #literaturem #ultimate #writing #art

The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#literature #postmodernism #humor

Orlando said it was important for scientists to have minds kept open by literature, and souls touched by the creativity of art. ↗

— Megan Frazer Blakemore

#literature #art

Like a blazing comet, I've traversed infinite nights, interstellar spaces of the imagination, voluptuousness and fear. I've been a man, a woman, an old person, a little girl, I've been the crowds on the grand boulevards of the capital cities of the West, I've been the serene Buddha of the East, whose calm and wisdom we envy. I've known honor and dishonor, enthusiasm and exhaustion. ...I've been the sun and the moon, and everything because life is not enough. ↗

— Antonio Tabucchi

#dreams

Literature is about as unnecessarily necessarily as tableware or ironed shirts. ↗

— Peter Bichsel

#literature #necessarily #shirts #unnecessarily

My works are Chinese literature, which is part of world literature. They show the life of Chinese people as well as the country's unique culture and folk customs. ↗

— Mo Yan

#chinese people #country #culture #customs #folk