Extraliterary Quotes & Sayings

The screen blanked, then produced a book cover. The jacket image - in black-and-white - showed barking dogs surrounding a scarecrow. In the background, shoulders slumped in a posture of weariness or defeat (or both), was a hunter with a gun. The eponymous Cortland, probably. — Stephen King

when we have no memory or little imagination of an alternative to a life centered on work, there are few incentives to reflect on why we work as we do and what we might wish to do instead. — Kathi Weeks

Art
make me eternal, give such body to my undying soul. ask the art, art can do it...
...art can give you the age you want, the life span you want...art can give an ever lasting face to your love and joys; art can give an unending life to your acts, and an novel agelessness to your intercourse with this life that you love and we love...we all. Love, that too is Art and fill your memory yard with its art exhibitions.... — Jamaluddin Jamali

An author's extraliterary utterance (blunt information), prenovel or postnovel, may infiltrate journalism; it cannot touch the novel itself. Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea. The art of the novel (worn yet opulent phrase) is in the mix of idiosyncratic language - language imprinted in the writer, like the whorl of a fingertip - and an unduplicable design inscribed on the mind by character and image. Invention has little capacity for the true-to-life snapshot. It is true to its own stirrings. — Cynthia Ozick

It seems we would rather have a past filled with great scientists than just great artists and writers who could dream up these wonderful and awe-inspiring creations. It's a strange irony: we're spending our time trying to find the truth in our past, but creating myths of ourselves in the present. — Aditya Iyengar

The history of science is rich in example of the fruitfulness of bringing two sets of techniques, two sets of ideas, developed in separate contexts for the pursuit of new truth, into touch with one another. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness. — David Brooks

Where there is no compassion, crime increases. — Nachman Of Breslov

The people in your happy memories have to be the same people who want to have you in their own happy memories. — Lydia Davis

I enjoy almost everything I do, perhaps because when I don't enjoy something, I don't do it. I enjoy writing; I enjoy teaching; I enjoy having a family to live among. I am neither a feminist nor an antifeminist, because it seems to me that we are first human beings and after that men and women. Human beings have, so far, proved interesting enough to keep me busy just trying to figure out what might be right and true about them. — Cynthia Voigt

A trial is not a search for truth. It is a contest and, often, one that produces no winners. — Andrew Vachss

Stephen is not a problem. He is a person. Invisibility is not a problem, it is a curse. Our mission is to help Stephen the person. Our quest is to find a way to break the curse. — Andrea Cremer

If you're sad and you like beer, I'm your lady, ... The Saddest Music in the World. — Isabella Rossellini