The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
I was, without a sliver of a doubt, a no-good, lazy slacker of a child, and after I discovered literature, I was totally and utterly a no-good, lazy slacker of a child who read books. A lot of books, good and bad, but my favourite - the books I read and reread in my teens - were by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.
I am extremely suspicious of dreams, apparitions and visions, both in literature and in films and plays. Perhaps it's because mental excesses of this sort smack too much of being 'arranged.'
Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress.
The study of social progress is today not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.
The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.
One has a sort of spiritual obligation to go back to the source material of the literature, to make contact with one of the seminal plays of the modern theater.
I write speculative fiction, and in my view, speculative fiction is really just a very intense version of the work of literature in general.
Literature is an easier way to study acting, because then you can take any kind of spin.
What I wanted to do was use literature and different kinds of stories and poems as a springboard, tapping into the creativity of our teens - I wanted teenagers to come up with their own creative responses to literature - using books themselves as a starting point.
Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.
So much of the literature we had to read for high school English class was filled with victimized, tragic, symbolic women who spurred the plot forward with their inevitable shunning/death/shunning-followed-by-pregnancy-followed-by-death timelines.
Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
In the field of aesthetic theory, humans are pattern-seeking creatures. That can be seen in terms of musical structures, patternmaking, even in terms of storytelling and literature.
Without the emotion of the beautiful, the sublime, the mysterious, there is no art, no religion, no literature.
I'm always trying to, using literature, subvert people's responses.
Examples one finds in the philosophical literature are somebody who's seen the trial of a child of theirs, where they're being proved guilty of some crime that would drive the parent into a depression, maybe a suicidal depression.
I was an editor for supplemental math, science, and literature programs for the primary grades and became very well versed in elementary curriculum, particularly PreK-2.
Art and literature are my surrogate religions.
All the questions discussed in the Talmud and related rabbinic literature are normative questions: either they are questions of what one is to think or what one is to do. Every prescribed thought has some practical implication; every prescribed act has some theoretical implication.
