Pastoral Resources

How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions?

The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

Postmodernism cost literature its audience.

The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

The study of social progress is today not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.

Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction.

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

In the same period, Polish literature also underwent some significant changes. From social-political literature, which had a great tradition and strong motivation to be that way, Polish literature changed its focus to a psychological rather than a social one.

Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.

I never wanted to become an actress because I'd read great literature or seen great Shakespeare. It was more just wanting to understand what the people were really like, why they said all the strange things they did.

If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.

Our literature is in great shape.

The establishment, the newspapers, they try to create something called Scottish literature, but when people are actually going to write, they are not going to necessarily prescribe to that, they'll write what they feel.

There's all this stuff that is happening in Edinburgh now, it's a sad attempt to create an Edinburgh society, similar to a London society, a highbrow literature celebrity society.

It's different in Scotland. People who come to readings are more interested in literature as such, but the readership in general is really quite diverse. It's a cliche, but it's said that people who read my books don't read any other books, and you do get that element.

I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.

In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at King's, especially the discovery of French and German literature.