Without the sun, the world would die of cold; without stories the world would die of boredom.
Poetry is word concentrate.
Words zoom, zip, soar, dive, fly upside down, loop, roll and rocket into space — Shakespeare.
A canon, some dogma, a couple of martyrs, a few prophets and some devotees — literature is religion.
Mr. Mark Twain became American literature when he trusted the American voice.
Words heal the brain; sentences heal the soul; books heal the world.
Literature and history share this, a passion to distort what happened.
Literature is the refrigerator that cools and preserves tommorrow’s word entree.
As the artist knifes paint onto his canvass so the writer spatulas words onto our minds.
Words are ambiguous, meaning is uncertain, every reading of the text is a re-writing of the text; but modern certainty about uncertainty must also be uncertain of its own uncertainty.
Literature is made up out of words that build what they destroy, disturb what they preserve and rearrange what remains the same.
Literature defines what we think is true — Ibsen.
It only takes a few words to trepanate a skull; read Emily Dickinson and vent your head.
Literature is culinary art with a slice of progaganda thrown in.
Stories restory our story.
One of the primary functions of literature is to entertain; we know this when what doesn’t delight doesn’t sell.
Southern American literarture feeds on death – Poe, Faulkner, McCullers, Jackson, Wharton, O’connor.
Every story ever written is every person’s story who has ever lived; this is what it means to understand.
Literature and science have this in common – both are lies that tell the truth, sometimes.
Literature for literature’s sake — a fun diversion before we debate again what it means.
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