There is a great discovery still to be made in literature that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
The knowledge of languages was very useful. I have a university degree in foreign languages and literature.
I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of my job but increasingly I found myself reading things that weren't really relevant to my academic work but were relevant to gardening.
There's a wealth of literature out there which hopefully will be you know exploded in the future and I personally find it very rewarding to be involved with classic storytelling and sort of legendary characters.
Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart the excision of its memory.
I tell my students it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see who's very far away who's a different color who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.
Maya Angelou the famous African American poet historian and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature believes a struggle only makes a person stronger.
The only sensible ends of literature are first the pleasurable toil of writing second the gratification of one's family and friends and lastly the solid cash.
Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature the texts our first attempt at cosmology making sense of where we are in the universe our first attempt at health care believing in faith healing our first attempt at philosophy.
Literature overtakes history for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.
You can use your means in a good and bad way. In German-speaking art we had such a bad experience with the Third Reich when stories and images were used to tell lies. After the war literature was careful not to do the same which is why writers began to reflect on the stories they told and to make readers part of their texts. I do the same.
The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.
Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
I grew up in an non-athletic family where my parents were interested in music in literature in education and art.
For this reason to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one's literary education very incomplete.
I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!
Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education medicine and law in journalism literature and art.
More particularly having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there and it will last forever.
To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.
Literature for me isn't a workaday job but something which involves desires dreams and fantasy.
The medical literature tells us that the most effective ways to reduce the risk of heart disease cancer stroke diabetes Alzheimer's and many more problems are through healthy diet and exercise. Our bodies have evolved to move yet we now use the energy in oil instead of muscles to do our work.
I studied literature design and fashion design.
The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions the emotions - it becomes sterile silly and actually without substance.
When you're going through something whether it's a wonderful thing like having a child or a sad thing like losing somebody you often feel like 'Oh my God I'm so overwhelmed I'm dealing with this huge thing on my own.' In fact poetry's a nice reminder that no everybody goes through it. These are universal experiences.