It seems to me that an author who has determined very new domains in literature is Gertrude Stein.

After the magical act accomplished by Joyce with Ulysses, perhaps we are getting away from it.

It doesn't seem to me that anyone has discovered much that's new since the Iliad or the Odyssey.

It is the creator of fiction's point of view; it is the character who interests him. Sometimes he wants to convince the reader that the story he is telling is as interesting as universal history.

All confessions are Odysseys.

Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey.

All societies are historical.

The Odyssey is the story of Americans up to the point where they are well-established, and even so it is detached from the historical side.

Ulysses finds himself unchanged, aside from his experience, at the end of his odyssey.

The Iliad is the private lives of people thrown into disorder by history.

Religions tend to disappear with man's good fortune.

Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything.

When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing.

We have gotten away from this double aspect of either putting the character back into historical events or of making a historical event of his very life.

The Odyssey is the story of someone who, in the course of diverse experiences, acquires a personality or affirms and recovers his personality.

There have been only rare moments in history where individual histories were able to run their course without wars or revolutions.

It seems to me that an author who has determined very new domains in literature is Gertrude Stein.

A very great Iliad... concerns the creation of a nation.

One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey.

To have one's own story told by a third party who doesn't know that the character in question is himself the hero of the story being told, that's a technical refinement.

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?