A Quote by John Steinbeck

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

John Steinbeck

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Banquet Bards Become Been Beginning Changed Churches City City Hall Critical December Despair Duties Elect Empty Except Exclusive Functions Game Grew Hall Human Literature Low More Need Needed Nobel Nor Old Our Out Pale Priesthood Responsibilities Separate Singing Species Speech Stockholm Writers

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John Steinbeck
American - Author
February 27, 1902 - December 20, 1968

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.

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

John Steinbeck

When Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature at the age of 88, she was the oldest person ever to receive the prize and one of only 11 female winners in its history. Her award was the end of a very long journey from a remote farm in Rhodesia to a banquet at Stockholm's Stadshus, the grand city hall in Stockholm.

Justin Cartwright

Writers throughout the ages have one weapon, which is literature, but they also have their responsibilities as a citizen when literature does not seem to suffice. I mean, they are not mutually exclusive. One continues to write anyway but if you are called out to demonstrate, if people are being killed in the streets, it's hardly the moment to go for your pen and paper, you know, help in one way or the other.

Wole Soyinka

It is customary for the recipient of this award to offer personal or scholarly comment on the nature and the direction of literature. At this particular time, however, I think it would be well to consider the high duties and the responsibilities of the makers of literature.

John Steinbeck

The Bible is all God's speech, as well as all mediated through human writers who wrote the individual books. It's a mistake to try to separate passages into a divine piece and a human piece. Rather, we should treat the Bible for what it is: divine and human all the way through. Of course God can quote human sinful speech, or describe human sinful actions, without implying that he approves them.

Vern Poythress

It's always easy to get people to condemn threats to free speech when the speech being threatened is speech that they like. It's much more difficult to induce support for free speech rights when the speech being punished is speech they find repellent.

Glenn Greenwald

South African literature is a literature in bondage. It is a less-than-fully-human literature. It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from prison.

J. M. Coetzee

The important thing is to do what you most love in the best way. If you love literature, you could be a great writer and perhaps one day become a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature.

Aaron Ciechanover

The greatest risk in giving our government any power to control our speech is that it would then have a vehicle to prohibit speech that was critical of it.

Kat Timpf

Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.

John Cheever

It is by education that we become prepared for our duties and responsibilities in life. If one is badly educated he must naturally fail in the proper assumption and practice of his duties and responsibilities.

Marcus Garvey

Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.

John Steinbeck

Whoever functions in an office or calling received from one who holds priesthood keys exercises priesthood authority in performing her or his assigned duties.

Dallin H. Oaks

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.

Vladimir Lenin

I think Bob Dylan showed us that songs can rise to the level of literature, and he proved it over and over again. That's why they keep trying to get him a Nobel Prize for literature: because there is no Nobel Prize for songwriting.

Mary Gauthier

A Quote by John Steinbeck

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