Best culture & literature Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“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.”

World Culture Literature Wish Novel Serious Reflection Mere Consumers Tokyo Subculture Consumer Culture Serious Work

Author:Kenzaburo Oe

“It is important to remember that some of the most serious thinkers once thought that democracy was not compatible with the cultures of Germany, Italy, Japan, Latin America and Russia.”

Important America Remember Culture Literature Democracy Serious Russia Germany Japan Latin Thinker Latin America Compatible

Author:Natan Sharansky

“Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is.”

Should Writing Culture Literature

Author:Irvine Welsh

“My works are Chinese literature, which is part of world literature. They show the life of Chinese people as well as the country's unique culture and folk customs.”

People World Wells Country Shows Culture Literature Unique Folks Chinese Customs World Literature

Author:Mo Yan

“Storytelling is how we survive, when there's no feed, the story feeds something, it feeds the spirit, the imagination. I can't imagine life without stories, stories from my parents, my culture. Stories from other people's parents, their culture. That's how we learn from each other, it's the best way. That's why literature is so important, it connects us heart to heart.”

People Way Heart I Can Important Stories Spirit Culture Literature Parent Imagination Imagine Best Way Storytelling Heart To Heart

Author:Alice Walker

“I moved here when I was 20 to go to college. After I moved here, I became much more aware of the importance of the culture and literature to my life. Sometimes when you're immersed in something, you just don't notice it very much. Moving away makes you appreciate your culture. Living here, I've thought more and more about India, and what being Indian-American means to me. And it's made me incorporate things from Indian literature into my own writing.”

Writing Mean Made Sometimes Moving Culture Literature My Own College Appreciate India Importance Moved Indian American Indian Moving Away Appreciate You

Author:Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

“Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.”

Culture Literature Media Reconstruction Art And Culture Media Control

Author:Allen Ginsberg

“The destination of the soul: this is what I, led on by Nils Holgersson, came to seek in the literature of Western Europe. I fervently hope that my pursuit, as a Japanese, of literature and culture will, in some small measure, repay Western Europe for the light it has shed upon the human condition.”

Humans Soul Light Culture Literature Conditions Europe Western Pursuit Destination Human Condition Shed Western Europe

Author:Kenzaburo Oe

“One of the most insidious myths in American wine culture is that a wine is good if you like it. Liking a wine has nothing to do with whether it is good. Liking a wine has to do with liking that wine, period. Wine requires two assessments: one subjective, the other objective. In this it is like literature. You may not like reading Shakespeare but agree that Shakespeare was a great writer nonetheless.”

Ifs May Two Culture Reading Literature Periods Agree Wine Myth Objectives Subjective You Like It Assessment Great Writers Insidious Reading Shakespeare

Author:Karen MacNeil

“Hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture.”

Hate Culture Literature Degrees Hatred Violent Strongest Peculiar Lowest

Book:Words of Goethe: being the conversations of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Source: Words of Goethe: being the conversations of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Piety is not a goal but a means to attain through the purest peace of mind the highest culture.”

Mind Mean Culture Literature Goal Highest Peace Of Mind Piety Pious

Author:Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Whether you interpret the Bible as literature or as the final word of whatever God may be, Christianity has given us an image of death and sexuality that we have based our culture around. A half-naked dead man hangs in most homes and around our necks, and we have just taken that for granted all of our lives.”

Men May Home Culture Literature Given Half Christianity Taken Our Lives Atheism Finals Positive Atheism Sexuality Naked Granted Necks Dead Man Final Words

Author:Marilyn Manson

“I wasn't reading it [the Bible] as literature. I was reading it as literature, and as history, and as a moral guide, and as anthropology and law and culture.”

Law Culture Reading Literature Moral Guides Anthropology

Author:David Plotz

“Leisure, itself the creation of wealth, is incessantly engaged in transmuting wealth into beauty by secreting the surplus energy which flowers in great architecture, great painting and great literature. Only in the atmosphere thus engendered floats that impalpable dust of ideas which is the real culture. A colony of ants or bees will never create a Parthenon.”

Ideas Real Culture Literature Energy Wealth Creation Painting Flower Architecture Dust Atmosphere Engaged Leisure Bees Floats Ants Colony Surplus Incessantly Great Literature Parthenon

Author:Edith Wharton

“Where no interest is takes in science, literature and liberal pursuits, mere facts and insignificant criticisms necessarily become the themes of discourse; and minds, strangers alike to activity and meditation, become so limited as to render all intercourse with them at once tasteless and oppressive.”

Mind Facts Culture Literature Interest Meditation Activity Criticism Mere Stranger Pursuit Theme Discourse Insignificant Intercourse

Author:Madame de Stael

“One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue: responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another.”

Humans Art Might Culture Literature Alive Art Is Tasks Dialogue Evolve Constructs Piety Responsiveness

Book:Susan Sontag: Ansprachen aus Anlass der Verleihung

Source: Susan Sontag: Ansprachen aus Anlass der Verleihung

“The masses are still ungrateful or ignorant. They prefer murder, poisonings, and crimes generally to a literature possessed of style and feeling.”

Stills Feelings Culture Literature Style Crime Mass Murder Ignorant Possessed Ungrateful Popular Culture Poisoning

Book:Letters of George Sand

Source: Letters of George Sand

“An abyss seems to have opened between the intellectual cosmopolites of culture and the people, hungry for word and meaning.”

People Seems Culture Literature Intellectual Hungry Abyss

Book:Ripening: Selected Work

Source: Ripening: Selected Work

“I claim that every woman in this century and in our culture sphere who has ventured into male-dominated institutions - 'literature' and 'aesthetics' are such institutions - must have experienced the desire for self-destruction.”

Self Desire Culture Literature Century Destruction Claims Institutions Males Sexism Spheres Aesthetics Self Destruction

Author:Christa Wolf

“It's hard to know what [literature] will end up being timeless and what will be something that doesn't translate into the future, especially with the way we're evolving since our culture is changing so fast.”

Knows Way Ends Hard Culture Literature Evolve Translate Timeless

Author:Rick Riordan

“I think most Native American literature is unreadable by the vast majority of Native Americans. Generally speaking Indians don't read books. It's not a book culture. That's why I'm trying to make movies. Indians go to movies; Indians own video recorders.”

Thinking Trying Book Culture Literature Majority Video Native Native American American Literature Recorders

Author:Sherman Alexie

“I would ask: Given the nature of free-market capitalism - where the rule is to rise to the top at all costs - is it possible to have a financial industry hero? And by the way, this is not a pop-culture trend we're talking about. There aren't many financial heroes in literature, theater or cinema.”

Way Culture Asks Literature Given Talking Industry Hero Cost Capitalism Theater Financial Pops Cinema Trends Free Market Pop Culture Free Market Capitalism

Author:Martin Scorsese

“I fell even more deeply in love with Tolkiens legendarium after studying Old English literature at uni, as I got a sense of the historical events and cultures that Tolkien used to create his world. My favourite of his imaginary locations is Lothlorien.”

World Used Culture Literature Study Events Historical Favourite Imaginary Location English Literature Old English Historical Events Deeply In Love

Author:Samantha Shannon

“Culture is fundamental. Literature saves you. Cinema saves you.”

Culture Literature Fundamentals Cinema

Author:Lea Seydoux

“I have watchedmany literary fashions shoot up and blossom, and then fade and drop.... Yet with the many that I have seen comeand go, I have never yet encountered a mode of thinking that regarded itself as simply a changing fashion, and not as an infallible approach to the right culture.”

Thinking Culture Literature Fashion Approach Thoughtful Fades Infallible Fads

Author:Ellen Glasgow

“The last publicized center of American writing was Manhattan. Its writers became known as the New York Intellectuals. With important connections to publishing, and universities, with access to the major book reviews, they were able to pose as the vanguard of American culture when they were so obsessed with the two Joes--McCarthy and Stalin--that they were to produce only two artists, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, who left town.”

Source: God made Alaska for the Indians: selected essays

“History is driven, over the long haul, by culture - by what men and women honor, cherish, and worship; by what societies deem to be true and good, and by the expressions they give to those convictions in language, literature, and the arts; by what individuals and societies are willing to stake their lives on.”

Source: The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God

“The Iranian people were converted to Islam not very much longer after the conquest of the Arab world by Islam, but they refused to adopt the Arabic language, and it's a great point of pride to them that Persian culture and the Persian language and Persian literature survived the conversion to Islam. And the conversion to Islam also was for most of them not the Sunni majority form, but the Shia one. So there's a great discrepancy between Iranian society and many other of what we think of as Arab Muslim States and systems.”

“There is nothing “still” in the remarkably visceral poems of Alexander Long's third collection, Still Life, and nothing is at rest in these restless and edgy poems. Conversational and kinetic, these poems chart the traces left by the shifting overlays of the templates of literature, rock-and-roll, and contemporary culture. As each poem in Still Life attempts to fix a focus upon a scene or subject, the protean natures under view draw the poet into the eddies and complexities of reflection. This is a powerful and moving collection of poems.”

“literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.”

Culture Literature Instruments Summary

Author:Cynthia Ozick

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Culture Quotes