A Quote by John Steinbeck
Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of a human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed
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Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair. Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species. --speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1962
Our culture has become something that is completely and utterly in love with its parent. It's become a notion of boredom that is bought and sold, where nothing will happen except that people will become more and more terrified of tomorrow, because the new continues to look old, and the old will always look cute.
I plead guilty to that when I was young pastor. In one of my churches I changed so much, one old wag said I'd changed everything in the church except the signs on the bathroom doors! I could have used a little more wisdom. And common sense.
When I grew older, I thought I would become an even more special person. But, it's not true. I eat more and I know a lot more things but I just become more pathetic. Is this what it's like to grow old?
Once you have speech, you don't have to wait for natural selection! If you want more strength, you build a stealth bomber; if you don't like bacteria, you invent penicillin; if you want to communicate faster, you invent the Internet. Once speech evolved, all of human life changed.
We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing — by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature.
I was asked to give a speech on the Everest swim, and during the Everest swim, I changed. I changed as a person, I honestly did. That mountain changed me, and I gave a speech about it for nine minutes.
I'm not a big fan of the thought that you can become a star by winning a contest. I'm sort of old-fashioned. I think people need to get out there and they need to work and they need to do their music because they love it. If they become successful, then great, and if they are not, whatever.
Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature.
The thing is, right now the films don't need to be overtly political to be about our times. We also need films that are just human, that are about people. People need that, too. It's like we need to reconnect to what it is to be human. Not just what our political situation is. That's not what I'm thinking about exclusively. Human content is needed again, as it was in the '70s. I think films were more human than they've been since then.
My music must be an artistic reproduction of human speech in all its finest shades. That is, the sounds of human speech, as the external manifestations of thought and feeling must, without exaggeration or violence, become true, accurate music.
We need new art. Old art cannot do that. It can do lots of other things, and of course humanity hasn't changed that much in the last thousand or two thousand years.So that the old Greek dramas are still at the very heart, core, of human experience, but still we need new stuff.
We need literature because we wouldn’t fully know ourselves without it. We need good literature to be fully human.
No armies are needed, no weapons are needed, no nations are needed, no religions are needed. All that is needed is a little meditativeness, a little silence, a little love, a little more humanity... just a little more, and existence will become fragrant with something so totally unique and new that you will have to find a new category for it.
Some things have never changed in India. Melody, for one. The sound has changed, the rhythm has changed, and lyrics have become more contemporary.
Literature must become party literature. Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat.
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