The stories of the first refugees that I ever came across in literature - that lots of people ever came across - were in 'The Iliad': the escape of Aeneas with his father on his back, the Trojans, from their burning city, and the defeat of their kingdom and what they had to do to try and find safety.
Before I began concentrating on writing, in my free time I was an artist, making and selling etchings illustrating stories based on my readings in classical literature.
We often see literature about women that impair and immerse the women themselves, such as when women are portrayed as objects of consumerism.
I feel that I have an impractical and deleterious snobbery about the relation of literature to the market. I thought, 'I've become the kind of crap you buy at airports!' It was exciting, but it was not a fantasy I'd ever had.
Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.
The history of fiction is about family - an inexhaustible subject for literature. We are creatures driven by emotions that are on high display in intimate relations - inside the family.
The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self.
The Russian yearning for the meaning of life is the major theme of our literature, and this is the real point of our intelligentsia's existence.
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.
Literature is a far more ancient and viable thing than any social formation or state. And just as the state interferes in literature, literature has the right to interfere in the affairs of state.
Istanbul is inspiring because it has its own code of architecture, literature, poetry, music.
I read, read enormously on all different fields of Islamic thought, from philosophy to Islamic literature, poetry, exegeses, knowledge of the Hadith, the teachings of the prophet. That's how I trained myself. And then I was appointed imam by a Sufi master from Istanbul, Turkey.
When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen.
The Malays can hardly be said to have an indigenous literature, for it is almost entirely derived from Persia, Siam, Arabia, and Java. Arabic is their sacred language.
The Gospel of Judas is a kind of protest literature. It's challenging leaders of the church.
The key thing for an intellectually rigorous writer to come to grips with is the marginalization of literature by more technologically sophisticated and thus more visceral forms.
I want to knock on people's doors and preach. But I also meet a lot of people on planes and in restaurants, and you can preach with them or place some literature with them.
A lot of my stories are inspired by Japanese folklore or literature or movies: I've done stories based on Kabuki and Noh plays, and on Kurosawa's 'Yojimbo' movies.
I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.
Lastly, literature and philosophy both allow past idols to be resurrected with a frequency which would be truly distressing to a sober scientist.
