There were, like, 20 of [Jackie Kennedy's biographies], which was interesting because they are not exactly high literature - they are pulpy. But the [Arthur] Schlesinger transcripts ended up being the most useful of anything.
I think what's happening is, it's all - fantasy, science fiction, ghosts, trolls, whatever - finally being called, being admitted to be literature. The way it used to be, before the Realists and the bloody Modernists took over.
What other culture could have produced someone like Hemmingway and not seen the joke?
These are the stories of travelers on a spiritual quest between worlds. Part mythmaker, part poet, Omar Castaeda is an original, and these stories are unlike any in our literature.
The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
When a man is treated like a beast, he says, 'After all, I'm human. ' When he behaves like a beast, he says 'After all, I'm only human.
Just as the office worker dreams of murdering his hated boss and so is saved from really murdering him, so it is with the author; with his great dreams he helps his readers to survive, to avoid their worst intentions. And society, without realizing it respects and even exalts him, albeit with a kind of jealousy, fear and even repulsion, since few people want to discover the horrors that lurk in the depths of their souls. This is the highest mission of great literature, and there is no other.
I saw within Its depth how It conceives All things in a single volume bound by Love of which the universe is the scattered leaves.
There is no such thing as children’s literature.
So many of the conscious and unconscious ways men and women treat each other have to do with romantic and sexual fantasies that are deeply ingrained, not just in society but in literature. The women's movement may manage to clean up the mess in society, but I don't know whether it can ever clean up the mess in our minds.
There are other issues I have felt more emotionally connected to, like China, where I lived and worked for some time. I was living there when Tiananmen Square erupted
To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
One does not set fire to a world which is already lost
Cham is the only thing to screw one up when one is down a peg.
Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.
Whatever you may say, the body depends on the soul.
We are all born marked for evil.
That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed in his literature. One cannot doubt that the martyrdom will continue to be gladly embraced. To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters.
I never knew a more presumptuous person than myself. The fact that I say that shows that what I say is true.
When I was a teacher, teachers would come into my classroom and admire my desk on which lay nothing whatever, whereas theirs were heaped with papers and books.