Nonfiction writers are the packhorses of literature. We're meant to carry the story. If we can make it up and down the mountain by a reliable if not scenic route, we have delivered. Technique is optional.
There is a lot of talk in the academy about the death of the humanities. Based on my readers' response and their interest in history and literature and art, the death of the humanities has been grossly overstated.
So much of young adult literature has turned dark, almost pathological. It's almost as if there is a race to see who can be the most dysfunctional.
There's a whole form of literature in India which talks about the quest for the perfect man by a woman, where every woman looks for a perfect man but only ends up with half that.
Throughout African-American literature, the writer has, in a sense, been burdened by the necessity of pleading the case for the whole race. For example, writers of slave narratives tend to lose their individual voices, as they were expected to stand in for all other voices, which were absent.
As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature.
The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
Postmodernism cost literature its audience.
The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.
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.
In all highly civilised communities Pretence is prominent, and sooner or later invades the regions of Literature.
I'm a big reader, so when I was in 'Pride and Prejudice,' or, like, in Poirots and Marples, those are all books that I loved, and so it was really exciting for me to inhabit characters from literature that I knew and recognized.
In the world of literature, I see prizes as more of a duty to the craft itself, rather than as something for the individual.
I do not see a necessary connection between proletarian literature and some set percentage of words which bring the blushes to a maiden's cheek.
Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.
The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.
I rarely ever put my head above the rampart and see where this big lumbering behemoth called 'global literature' is going.
Cock-fighting, which has attained to the dignity of a literature of its own, is the popular Malay sport; but the grand sport is a tiger and buffalo fight, reserved for rare occasions, however, on account of its expense. Cock-fighting is a source of gigantic gambling and desperate feuds.
In my writing, I try to combine all my favorite elements of journalism - accuracy, real characters that exist on this planet - with all my favorite elements of literature: a sense of flow, of propulsion, of wanting to read every sentence.
It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.
