#literature

"I awoke one morning to find myself famous."

"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners."

"To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength."

"Fly without wings; Dream with open eyes; See in darkness."

"The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering."

"I am the shore and the ocean, awaiting myself on both sides."

"Since there is no real silence, Silence will contain all the sounds, All the words, all the languages, All knowledge, all memory."

"No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes"

"There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause."

"I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time."

"If my favorite three letters are X, Z, and Q, then my favorite word is Xazaqazax. It means “a lover of love."

"Busy with the ugliness of the expensive success We forget the easiness of free beautyLying sad right around the corner, Only an instant removed, Unnoticed and squandered."

"The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder."

"Literature is news that stays news."

"The ‘Muse’ is not an artistic mystery, but a mathematical equation. The gift are those ideas you think of as you drift to sleep. The giver is that one you think of when you first awake."

"I think imagination is at the heart of everything we do. Scientific discoveries couldn't have happened without imagination. Art, music, and literature couldn't exist without imagination. And so anything that strengthens imagination, and reading certainly does that, can help us for the rest of our lives."

"In general there should be gay characters in YA because a) surprise, there are gay folks everywhere and b) in my opinion as a father, there’s not a damn thing wrong with my child encountering gay folks in her literature, because see point a)."

"Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary."

"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers."

"People may think of Southern humor in terms of missing teeth and outhouse accidents, but the best of it is a rich vein running through the best of Southern literature."