Quote

Literature is one of the most interesting and significant expressions of humanity.

Literature seems to offer lessons in human nature that help us decode the world around us and be better friends.

For humanism also appeals to man as man. It seeks to liberate the universal qualities of human nature from the narrow limitations of blood and soil and class and to create a common language and a common culture in which men can realize their common humanity.

My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

Life provides material for its agitation which makes its general views comprehensible to the masses.

I don't want to make any general statements, but I feel like so many stories that are presented as being about humanity and human emotion are just so convoluted and overly dramatic and focus on these certain little things that are supposedly meaningful, but just don't really mean anything.

To realize life in the abstract as noble or beautiful or humane, to set it forth so with radiance upon it, that is civilization in the arts. Shakespeare is the chief modern example of this supreme faculty of mankind.

Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That's the kind of writing that interests me.

There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.