World Literature Quotes:

Most of what we call the classics of world literature suggest artifacts in a wax museum. We have to hire and pay professors to get them read and talked about.

- Edward Abbey

source: Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.36, RosettaBooks

topic: Museums, World Literature, Pay

I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature.

- Edward Abbey

topic: Cowboy, World Literature, Certain

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it.

- C. S. Lewis

topic: Reality, Doe, Add, Studying Literature, Daily Motivation

National literature does not mean much these days; now is the age of world literature, and every one must contribute to hasten thearrival of that age.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

topic: Mean, Age, Doe, World Literature, Internationalism

Literature is the question minus the answer.

- Roland Barthes

topic: Art, Healing, Poetry, World Literature, Minus

But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

- Aldous Huxley

topic: Hipster, Real, Brave New World, World Literature, Brave New World Character

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

source: Source: scrapsfromtheloft.com

topic: Art, Struggle, Love Is, World Literature

Why can't we simply borrow what is useful to us from Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, especially Zen, as we borrow from Christianity, science, American Indian traditions and world literature in general, including philosophy, and let the rest go hang? Borrow what we need but rely principally upon our own senses, common sense and daily living experience.

- Edward Abbey

topic: Philosophy, Buddhism, Common Sense, Daily Living, World Literature

All third world literature is about nation, that identity is the fundamental literary problem in the third world. The writer's identity is insecure because the nation's identity is not secure. The nation doesn't provide the third world writer with a secure identity, because the nation is colonized, it's oppressed, it's part of somebody else's empire.

- Mark McMorris

source: Source: www.raintaxi.com

topic: Insecure, Identity, Empires, World Literature

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.

- Mo Yan

source: "Nobel winner Mo Yan speaks up for jailed 'subversive' Liu Xiaobo" by Alison Flood, www.theguardian.com. October 12, 2012.

topic: Country, Unique, People, World Literature

I read world literature and I read French romances in the originals. I had quite a profound knowledge - no, that sounds conceited, but I did have a profound interest in everything spiritual.

- Baldur von Schirach

source: "The Nuremberg Interviews". Book by Leon Goldensohn, 2004.

topic: Spiritual, Conceited, Profound, World Literature

The rise to prominence of the Saudi novel in Arabic is the great man-bites-dog of recent world literature. Saudi Arabia is a country without a free press, where European styles and forms are distrusted and where the female half of the population became literate only in this generation.

- James Buchan

topic: Country, Dog, Men, World Literature

The Astonishment Tapes will now take its place within the growing field of international research about postwar American poetry's important contribution to world literature. Miriam Nichols has once again done exceptional scholarship.

- Peter Gizzi

topic: Important, Done, Research, World Literature, American Poetry