literature

Fitzgerald has charm. It's a silly word, but it's an exact word for me. I like 'The Great Gatsby' and it's sad, gay nostalgia.

We sometimes hear of the death of literature or of this or that genre, but literature doesn't die, just as it doesn't 'progress' or 'decay.' It expands, it increases. When we feel that it has become stagnant or stale, that usually just means we ourselves are not paying sufficient attention.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

But if what can exist does exist, is memory invention or is invention memory?

The core _ and perhaps unexpected _ thing that books do for us is simplify. It sounds odd, because we think of literature as sophisticated. But there are powerful ways in which books organise, and clarify our concerns _ and in this sense simplify.

I think the novel is a wonder....it has vitality to an extraordinary degree, and glamour, and a great deal of underlying thought of unusual quality....And as for the sheer writing, it's astonishing. [About The Great Gatsby]

I see the process of reaching out, sharing yourself, communicating, establishing contact between two people as similar to, if not the same as, the interaction between two people entering a relationship in literature _ that is, as reader and writer. Both seem to have the same astounding possibilities and the same terrible pitfalls. But if you battle through and souls touch, magic happens. Love. We feel more human, more alive, more understood, naked and yet protected from the cold of isolation and indifference. Our loneliness is, temporarily, held at bay.

As it happened I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even of self-definition _ I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another; in fact, if I read something I admired I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.

Utopia retains throughout its long history the basic form of the narrative of a journey... First comes the picture of a happy people in a beautiful and well-ordered setting; then comes the lecture on how it all came about, how it works, and, by implication, how it might be made to work in the traveller's own society.

To write? Because all this is ging to vanish. The only thing left will be the prose and poems, the books, what is written down. Without it the past would completely vanish, and we would be left we nothing, we would be naked on earth.

Never try to outgrow the people who were helping you walk, when you could not even walk.

And that is to say, of course, that you can "read" a culture without its literature, without the bother of gathering and holding its ideas, considering their genesis and evolution, and weighing them in the balance with each other.

If he had stayed in Slovenia, and Slovenia had stayed Communist, Zizek would not have been the nuisance he has since become. Indeed, if there were no greater reason to regret the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, the release of Zizek on to the world of Western scholarship would perhaps already be a sufficient one.

The real reason for quest is always self-knowledge.

I have lived so long within the circle of this book [Tender Is The Night] and with these characters that often it seems to me that the real world does not exist but that only these characters exist, and, however pretentious that remark sounds....it is an absolute fact---so much so that their glees and woes are just exactly as important to me as what happens in life.

But, like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life's mundane matters. "Who are the best musicians for these songs?" "Am I recording in the right studio?" "Is this song in the right key?" Some things never change, even in 400 years.Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, "Are my songs literature?"So, I do thank the Swedish Academy, both for taking the time to consider that very question, and, ultimately, for providing such a wonderful answer.

Look up. This is the season of shooting stars. Light, two thousand years old, still dazzling. Let me see your face. Your face lit up by twenty centuries.

Line in nature is not found;Unit and universe are round;In vain produced, all rays return;Evil will bless, and ice will burn.