literature

I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an art that can foresee the time when it will be silenced, an art that can become inflamed with its own virtue, fall in love with its own decline, and court its own demise.

But the thing about Literature is, well, basically it encapsulates all the disciplines - it's history, philosophy, politics, sexual politics, sociology, psychology, linguistics, science. Literature is mankind's organised response to the world around him, or her.

You can be a good painter if you study Cézanne's vision. Whoever dares to copy Van Gogh falls inevitably into the hell of imitators. For this painter didn't care about masterpieces, or even good paintings... but about what is beyond all painting, all art.

My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger" - Billy Connolly

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

Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some object outside of literature. Writing as a sylistic exercise seemed barren to me. Poetry as the art of the word made me yawn. I also understood that I couldn't sustain myself very long on the poems of others. I had to go out from myself and literature, look around in the world and lay hold of other spheres of reality.

AND where did the books go when the world turned against them? When the flames of wrath blackened their pages and erased the words, they fled to find solace and redemption in the dark places of the world.__hey were exiled into darkness so their own light might one day return to illuminate the world. They went underground, literally and metaphorically, so that their haven became the hidden places far beneath the feet of their persecutors.__hus was born the Incunabula: it was forged by fire and persecution, to preserve and protect until the book might rise, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of demise.

The principle of art is to pause, not bypass. The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke. This requires a moment of pause--a contract with yourself through the object you look at or the page you read. In that moment of pause, I think life expands. And really the purpose of art--for me, of fiction--is to alert, to indicate to stop, to say: Make certain that when you rush through you will not miss the moment which you might have had, or might still have. That is the moment of finding something which you have not known about yourself, or your environment, about others and about life.

The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter, on the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity.

I find it sad that more Christian literature does not address miracles, and the possibility of demons in our midst. Jesus performed countless miracles in his life that were clearly discussed in the New Testament. And, he cast out demons. Why do some Christians act as those the potential for miracles died with Him? Why do people believe in angels, but not demons? Both were evident in the Bible.

Read sometimes for the story, Bobby. Don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words - the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers that won't do that. But when you find a book that has both good story and good words, treasure that book.

Stories don__ teach us to be good; it isn__ as simple as that. They show us what it feels like to be good, or to be bad. They show us people like ourselves doing right things and wrong things, acting bravely or acting meanly, being cruel or being kind, and they leave it up to our own powers of empathy and imagination to make the connection with our own lives. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don__. It isn__ like putting a coin in a machine and getting a chocolate bar; we__e not mechanical, we don__ respond every time in the same way_The moral teaching comes gently, and quietly, and little by little, and weighs nothing at all. We hardly know it__ happening. But in this silent and discreet way, with every book we read and love, with every story that makes its way into our heart, we gradually acquire models of behaviour and friends we admire and patterns of decency and kindness to follow.

Is Shimmer a floor wax or a dessert topping? Is an electron a wave or a particle? Slipstream tells us that the answer is yes.

Clarissa had a theory in those days - they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people.

To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.

That such a slave as this should wear a sword,Who wears no honesty. Such smiling rogues as these,Like rats, oft bite the holy cords atwainWhich are too intrinse t' unloose; smooth every passionThat in the natures of their lords rebel,Being oil to the fire, snow to the colder moods,Renege, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaksWith every gale and vary of their mastersKnowing naught, like dogs, but following.

It is naive to suppose that something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in another without significantly changing its meaning, texture or value. Much prose translates fairly well from one language to another, but we know that poetry does not; we may get a rough idea of the sense of a translated poem but usually everything else is lost, especially that which makes it an object of beauty. The translation makes it into something it was not.

Of course, that__ one of the dreams of modernist literature, whether realist or fantastic: that the more stories we tell each other about such tragedies, the fewer of them there will be. We__e still waiting for the results.