We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.

We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.

There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.

Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape.

Those who live, live off the dead.

So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by which man tries to cleanse himself of despair.

It is not opium which makes me work but its absence, and in order for me to feel its absence it must from time to time be present.

I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.

Don't tire yourself more than need be, even at the price of founding a culture on the fatigue of your bones.

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

When we speak the word "life," it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.

Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of your bones.

When we speak the word 'life,' it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.

Cruelty signifies rigor implacable intention and decision irreversible and absolute determination.

We do not die because we have to die we die because one day and not so long ago our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary.

I see in the act of throwing the dice and of risking the affirmation of some intuitively felt truth however uncertain my whole reason for living.

Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape.

The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything -- gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness -- rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.

Judaism has always been a strong interest of mine. My two sons speak Hebrew and are familiar with the scriptures and with rabbinic literature. This is the way we live.

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.

During our stay in London for the first time I was able to establish personal contact with some of the organic chemists, whose work I knew and admired from the literature. I found them most gracious and helpful.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

Jesus claimed He had the power to raise himself from the dead and His followers would be raised from the dead. That's a unique claim in the literature of religion.

The Arab world also won the Nobel with me. I believe that international doors have opened, and that from now on, literate people will consider Arab literature also. We deserve that recognition.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern.

Acquiring a repertoire in these days, when the vocal literature is so immense, so overwhelming, that the student with sense will devote all his energies to work and not imagine himself a martyr to art.

I think Maus I is better than Maus II. The standard here is whether or not it's as good as a great book of prose literature and by that standard, no, it's not that great.

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.

The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.

I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.

The study of social progress is today not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.

The concept of industry domination of regulatory agencies was well known and documented in the literature by the 1960s.

It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

The proverbial philosophy of a people helps us to understand more about them than any other kind of literature.

Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

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.

Literature is the immortality of speech.

Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.

You know, 20 years... the films of television when it started, the literature, radio in communist countries, they're clean as a whistle; there was no violence, no sex, no drugs, nothing.

Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.

Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.

The day is past when schools could afford to give sufficient time and attention to the teaching of the ancient languages to enable the student to get that enjoyment out of classical literature that made the lives of our grandfathers so rich.

I didn't choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to the place.

Underground literature only began in the '70s, when technical developments made it possible. Before that, we were involved in a game with the censors. That was our struggle.

What good is a writer if he can't destroy literature? And us... what good are we if we don't help as much as we can in that destruction?