Pamela Dean Quotes

It is the life in literature that acts upon life.

Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress.

I think if a book has the power to move a reader, it also has the power to offend a reader. And you want your books to have power, so you just have to take what comes with that.

If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.

Books, we are told, propose to instruct or to amuse. Indeed! A true antithesis to knowledge, in this case, is not pleasure, but power. All that is literature seeks to communicate power; all that is not literature, to communicate knowledge.

I feel very conscious of my influences. T.H. White is very important for me.

I'm more influenced by novelists than I am by filmmakers.

Literature may be false, but it is not trivial.

I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.

Some may find them merely diverting melodies. Others may find them incitements to Red revolution. And who will say if either or both is wrong? Not I.

Reading a great book causes jolts and frights.

I am not sure how a novel changes the world. I think it alters a reader's perspective by asking him or her to see the world through another consciousness. That can perhaps cause people to see their own lives differently. Or just give a single day, a single moment, a slightly different sheen.

As something has involuntarily crept into my head through my eyes,I love to indulge it, even though it may be all wrong.

How important my books are or anybody's books are, I don't know. I don't think they are terribly important I think that they make people contented during the period they are reading them and this is worth something is to take care of somebody for a couple of hours.

If I had never touched Holmes, who has tended to obscure my higher work, my position in literature would at the present moment be a more commanding one.

I know when I watch certain actors or if I watch Thom Yorke sing on stage, I'm affected by it emotionally. I guess that's what we are all striving for in art but that's such a beautiful thing that happens between two people that may never even meet. So when you do get to meet someone who was affected in that way, it's awesome.

I wanted to be a visual artist, but I realized I was more affected by what I read than by what I saw. I would go to a show at a museum and look at a painting and say, 'Oh I wish I owned that,' and that would be the end of my relationship with a painting. With a short story I would read or with an author I would discover I could be haunted. It would affect my mood and affect the way that I saw the world. I thought, wow, it would be amazing to be able to do that.

Charles Dickens' creation of Mr. Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human race - I say it in all seriousness - than Cardinal Newman's Lead Kindly Light Amid the Encircling Gloom. Newman only cried out for light in the gloom of a sad world. Dickens gave it.

Whatever Kurt Vonnegut's ultimate status will be in the annals of literature, he was important to a lot of people right now. That's what most writers really care about.

The hand of bone and sinew and flesh achieves its immortality in taking up a pen. The hand on a page wields a greater power than the fleshly hand ever could in life.

There are various art forms we may or may not have talent for, may or may not have time for, and we may or may not be able to express ourselves in, but we ought to consider this fact-that whether we choose to be an environment or not, we are. We produce an environment other people have to live in. We should be conscious of the fact that this environment which we produce by our very 'being' can affect the people who live with us or work with us.

Good literature makes your head throb heartlike

When my own writing needs a perk, I open Zukofsky and read from "A" - particularly sections "22" and "23." It can be opaque, but I love the intensity.

I respect Millar, sir: he has raised the price of literature.