If you read literature, you put yourself in somebody else's shoes. You learn from great figures in literature.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
You become a reader by reading the literature, not by reading the handbooks about it.
For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.
Literature helps us transcend ourselves.
When I was a kid, I went through the whole process of reading great literature and trying to be very widely read.
I consider what I write to be literature. I choose the words carefully.
The thing about literature is that, yes, there are kind of tides of fashion, you know; people come in and out of fashion; writers who are very celebrated fall into, you know, people you know stop reading them, and then it comes back again.
I'm not into high literature, but I think all my books are literate.
The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.
The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them.
You can't live for literature. You can't live for the job.