#literature

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write. ↗

— Thomas Carlyle

#great #great discovery #literary #literary men #literature

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

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature. ↗

— Jean Cocteau

#commonplace #did #done #effect #freshness

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order. ↗

— Jean Cocteau

#greatest #literature #masterpiece #only #order

In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life. ↗

— J. M. Coetzee

#authoritative #belongs #conception #could #days

There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind. ↗

— J. M. Coetzee

#case #comes #culture #imitation #immediately

The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature. ↗

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#being #exquisitely #genius #hence #humour

People whose understanding and taste in literature, painting, and music are beyond question are, for the most part, ignorant of what is good or bad art in the theater. ↗

— Minnie Maddern Fiske

#bad #beyond #good #ignorant #literature