A Quote by Laura Riding

All literature is written by the old to teach the young how to express themselves so that they in turn may write literature to teach the old how to express themselves. All literature is written by mentally precocious adolescents and by mentally precocious senescents.

Laura Riding

Quote Topics

Express How Literature May Mentally Old Precocious Teach Themselves Turn Write Written Young

Quote Author

Laura Riding
American - Novelist
January 16, 1901 - September 2, 1991

One of the things I always underscore when I teach criticism is that young critics, or would be critics, frequently have this illusion that if they write about music they're somehow part of music, or if they write about movies they're part of movies, or of they write about theater they're part of theater, or write about literature. Writing is a part of literature, we belong the species of literature. If you add all the music reviews together that have ever been written, they don't create two notes of music.

Gary Giddins

I would not have majored in English and gone on to teach literature had I not been able to construct a counterargument about the truthfulness of fiction; still, as writers turn away from the industrious villages of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, I learn less and less from them that helps me to ponder my life. In time, I found myself agreeing with the course evaluations written by my testier freshman students:'All the literature we read this term was depressing.' How naive. How sane.

Mary Rose O'Reilley

Literature is breathing. I teach literature the way someone else might teach First Aid.

Gustavo Perez Firmat

I think so much of young adult literature sort of gets ghettoized - the title 'young adult' makes people immediately discount it. And just like with books that get written for adults, there is plenty of young adult literature that is bad. But there is also plenty of young adult literature that is brilliant.

Alexi Zentner

When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written.

George Saintsbury

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

I teach a 14-week semester, and one of the things I do when I have to teach literature is, for the first half hour of the class, I have the students write the beginning of a new story every week. At the end of the semester, even if they have learned nothing about literature, at least they'll have 14 beginnings that they can take with them.

Ethan Canin

People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves. What I'm desperately trying to do is to get students to talk to themselves as though they are indeed themselves, and not someone else.

Harold Bloom

When we seem to have won or lost in terms of certainties, we must, as literature teachers in the classroom, remember such warnings -- let literature teach us that there are no certainties, that the process is open, and that it may be altogether salutary that it is so.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

No one spoke in terms of children's literature, as opposed to adult literature, until around the 1940s. It wasn't categorised much before then. Even Grimm's tales were written for adults. But it is true that ever since 'Harry Potter' there has been a renaissance in fantasy literature. J. K. Rowling opened the door again.

Rick Riordan

There's a difference between children's literature and all-ages literature. One is written expressly for children. The other is written for everyone, including children. And the difference usually manifests in not talking down to kids.

Ryan North

There is a tradition that sees journalism as the dark side of literature, with book writing at its zenith. I don't agree. I think that all written work constitutes literature, even graffiti.

Eduardo Galeano

A theme that has always interested me is how women express anger, how women express violence. That is very much part of who women are, and it's so unaddressed. A vast amount of literature deals with cycles of violence about men, antiheroes. Women lack that vocabulary.

Gillian Flynn

If you look at the beginning of children's entertainment in literature, the first books that were written for kids were cautionary tales. They were books that were there to teach kids about growing up and how to live life.

Lee Unkrich

Literature makes history come to life. It is maybe the most accurate depiction of history, especially literature that was written in the time period depicted in the story.