A Quote by Carol Bly

Literature has low enough standards. But we can avoid writing the worst literature if we make ourselves ask ourselves, every two or three sentences we write, 'Is that what I really think?'

Carol Bly

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Carol Bly
American - Author
April 16, 1930 - December 21, 2007

Instead of educating the I.Q., we need to educate the H.Q., the heart quotient, the matters of truth, love, justice, and compassion. There are two ways to do this. One is through the read life experiences and the other is through literature. Literature has the power to take us outside ourselves and returns to ourselves a changed self.

Jim Trelease

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

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 refuse to see literature as amusement, as a game. I think that you ought not to approach literature without a moral responsibility for every word you write.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

As a form of moral insurance, at least, literature is much more dependable than a system of beliefs or a philosophical doctrine. Since there are no laws that can protect us from ourselves, no criminal code is capable of preventing a true crime against literature; though we can condemn the material suppression of literature - the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books - we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: that of not reading the books. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is a nation, it pays with its history.

Joseph Brodsky

We do all, myself included, we tend to hold ourselves to pretty low standards. But when it comes to judging public figures or politicians or people we've never met, we tend to hold people to very high standards, and, if we held ourselves to those standards, we'd always fall short.

Moby

The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.

Augusten Burroughs

If we don't get violent with ourselves, castigate ourselves, ostracize ourselves and excommunicate ourselves because we didn't live up to the standards we set down for ourselves, then maybe we don't have to do that with other people.

Frederick Lenz

I have this belief that we are so vulnerable when we open ourselves up to literature. We're reminded of these real parts of ourselves.

Tracy K. Smith

Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.

Virginia Woolf

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.

Gustave Flaubert

We read literature for a lot of reasons, but two of the most compelling ones are to get out of ourselves and our life stories and – equally important – to find ourselves by understanding our own life stories more clearly in the context of others.

Maureen Corrigan

The greatness of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.

T. S. Eliot

Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature.

Stieg Larsson

I love a lot of American writers, but I think that for the most part the scope of what's accepted as great American writing is very limited. What we have is good, but it's limited. There's not enough engagement with the world. Our literature's not adventurous enough. The influence of MFA writing tends to make things repetitive. The idea that writing can be taught has changed the whole conversation in the U.S.

Rabih Alameddine

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

A Quote by Carol Bly

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