#literature

Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza! ↗

— Roman Payne

#ibiza #libraries #lifestyle #literary #literary-life

In the language of the day it is customary to describe a certain sort of book as “escapist” literature. As I understand it, the adjective implies, a little condescendingly, that the life therein depicted cannot be identified with the real life which the critic knows so well in W.C.1: and may even have the disastrous effect on the reader of taking him happily for a few hours out of his own real life in N.W.8. Why this should be a matter for regret I do not know; nor why realism in a novel is so much admired when realism in a picture is condemned as mere photography; nor, I might add, why drink and fornication should seem to bring the realist closer to real life than, say, golf and gardening. ↗

— A.A. Milne

#literature #realism #life

Literature deals with morality but does not necessarily, does not, qua literature, help you to be more moral, either by precept or example. It makes you more aware. Which is to say that it makes you more human by making life more, not less, difficult. When you become more aware, the area of moral choice is widened. You can be a better man; you can also be a worse. Literature will not determine which. It is the equivalent of neither grace nor good works. ↗

— Eric Bentley

#literature #life

I awoke one morning to find myself famous. ↗

— George Gordon Byron

#life #literature #success #dreams

Into the day as by dream I swim To the music of nourished meaning. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#day #dejan-stojanovic #dream #dreams #literature

Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness. ↗

— Tim Gillespie

#literature #reading #dreams

Sometimes, in the course of my hopeless quest, I would pick up and dip into one of the ordinary books that lay strewn around the castle. Whenever I did, it seemed so insipid and insubstantial that I flew into a rage and hurled it at the wall after reading the first few sentences. I was spoilt for any other form of literature, and the mental torment I endured was comparable to the agony of unrequited love compounded by the withdrawal symptoms associated with a severe addiction. ↗

— Walter Moers

#reading #dreams

As George Russell defined a literary movement: “Five or six men who live in the same town and hate each other. ↗

— Ross Wetzsteon

#movement #dreams

Dream by making and make by dreaming. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#dream #dreaming #literature #literature-quotes #making

They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction. 'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all. ↗

— John Gardner

#historical-fiction #last-lines #literature #retelling #historical