Our literature is in great shape.

I think ethnic and regional labels are insulting to writers and really put restrictions on them. People don't think your work is quite as universal.

Nobody would take checks from Indians, nobody would give them any credit, and nobody would let them drink in the bars. There was a rudeness, a brusqueness, with which the Indians were treated constantly. At a very young age, that had entered my consciousness.

The title of the poems was The Only Bar in Dixon. We sent it out to The New Yorker on a fluke, and they took them and printed all three in the same issue.

Before, Indian people had been so defeated, they were always looking for outsiders, for the government, to somehow come in and fix things. But now, they seem to realize that they're the only ones who can save themselves.

The townspeople outside the reservations had a very superior attitude toward Indians, which was kind of funny, because they weren't very wealthy; they were on the fringes of society themselves.

I wrote a lot in study hall to while away the hours.

I am definitely a storyteller, but probably not a traditional Storyteller.

I used to object to being called an Indian writer, and would always say I was a writer who happened to be an Indian, and who happened to write about Indians.

Our literature is in great shape.

In a lot of Indian societies, spirituality has been lost, I think it's still the best way of looking at the world for Indians - better than any organized religion in this country.

Richard Hugo taught me that anyone with a desire to write, an ear for language and a bit of imagination could become a writer. He also, in a way, gave me permission to write about northern Montana.

My poems were just kind of all over the place. They had no focus, no location, nothing. Kind of a series of images that could have been set anywhere. A lot of the poems were just exercises for myself.

The economic piece is still missing, since it's so hard to attract industry to reservations, but spiritually and educationally, they're doing just fine. Each tribe has a community college now, and they teach the language, they teach the traditions.

To receive this award from an organization I admire so much makes me totally happy and grateful.

I wander around, get the lay of the land and try to imagine what kind of people would have lived there in that historical period. What would they eat? What kind of clothing would they wear? How did they shelter themselves? How did they get around?

I do believe in the viability of Indian spiritualism.

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?

In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read.

The instinct to impersonate produces the actor; the desire to provide pleasure by impersonations produces the playwright; the desire to provide this pleasure with adequate characterization and dialogue memorable in itself produces dramatic literature.

I've always said that music is like literature.