A Quote by Katie Kitamura

The point about sales is relevant because it suggests there are cultures out there that are supporting and consuming, on a vast scale, challenging works of literature. Works of literature that in the United States would sell only a few thousand copies, if they managed to find a publisher at all. The success of these texts in Spain or Italy or wherever contributes to a kind of national conversation that we're perhaps not having here in the U.S.

Katie Kitamura

Quote Topics

About Because Challenging Challenging Work Consuming Conversation Copies Cultures Few Find Having Italy Kind Literature National Only Out Perhaps Point Publisher Relevant Sales Scale Sell Spain States Success Supporting Texts Thousand United United States Vast Wherever Works Would

Quote Author

Katie Kitamura
American - Novelist
Born: 1979

Literature cannot develop between the categories "permitted"—"not permitted"—"this you can and that you can't." Literature that is not the air of its contemporary society, that dares not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers, such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a facade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as waste paper instead of being read. -Letter to the Fourth National Congress of Soviet Writers

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In the literature of France Moliere occupies the same kind of position as Cervantes in that of Spain, Dante in that of Italy, and Shakespeare in that of England. His glory is more than national - it is universal.

Lytton Strachey

I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large.

Kenzaburo Oe

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

In general, in America, every discourse in literature in 15 minutes degenerates into a conversation about ethics, morality and this and that. The Holocaust and the consequences of it. Well, I find it terribly boring, predictable and unimportant, because what matters about literature is esthetic achievement.

Joseph Brodsky

Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.

Marilyn Hacker

What is literature, really? Boiled down to a single sentence, I'd say it's this: an endless conversation about what it means to be human. And to read literature is to engage in that conversation.

Nicole Krauss

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

Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

That love is a conflict seems to me obvious and natural. There isn't a single worthwhile work in world literature based on love that is only about the conquest of happiness, the effort to arrive at what we call love. It's the struggle that has always interested those who produce works of art - literature, cinema or poetry.

Michelangelo Antonioni

English is, from my point of view as an Americanist, an ethnicity. And English literature should be studied in Comparative Literature. And American literature should be a discipline, certainly growing from England and France, Germany, Spain, Denmark, and the Native traditions, particularly because those helped form the American canon. Those are our backgrounds. And then we'd be doing it the way it ought to be done. And someday I hope that it will be.

Paula Gunn Allen

The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.

Annie Dillard

My parents have a ridiculous work ethic; my dad just works, works, works, works, works. I think it would be hard to find a guy who's logged more hours than that guy.

Bill Burr

As writers, the world is not about individual expression entirely because we are producing works of literature and getting them out into the world.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading.

Gilbert Murray

These little books I write, such as The End of Freedom, about the post-9/11 political climate in the United States, sell in the hundreds of thousands of copies. Whereas, I hear novels on marriage are not selling. This is perhaps not the judgment of God, but it is certainly that of history.