Lionel Trilling Quotes

Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.

If people aren't creating literature, there would be nothing for people to criticize.

A good poem is a contribution to reality.

Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.

Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge - it is as immortal as the heart of man.

What I love about writing is the contradictions we all embody as human beings.

We depict hatred, but it is to depict that there are more important things. We depict a curse, to depict the joy of liberation.

In fact, one of the things that I really love about literary fiction is that it's one of the few kinds of writing that doesn't tell us what to think or what to buy or what to wear. We're surrounded by advertising.

the arts are life accelerated and concentrated.

Whether our work is art or science or the daily work of society, it is only the form in which we explore our experience which is different.

What is literature compared with cooking? The one is shadow, the other is substance.

If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write.

Art comes from joy and pain...But mostly from pain.

I'm always writing - its what I like to do. But when I'm not writing, I'm reading.

You make films to give people something, to transport them somewhere else, and it doesn't matter if you transport them to a world of intuition or a world of intellect...The realm of superstitions, fortune-telling, presentiments, intuition, dreams, all this is the inner life of a human being, and all this is the hardest thing to film... I've been trying to get there from the beginning. I'm somebody who doesn't know, somebody who's searching.

Art is good for my soul precisely because it reminds me that we have souls in the first place.

What is literature, really? Boiled down to a single sentence, I'd say it's this: an endless conversation about what it means to be human. And to read literature is to engage in that conversation.

I don't think meeting people that I've done pictures of spoils it at all because I like the really human sides of people. To meet them and see that they're complicated and weird or shy or any of those things sort of makes it even better - to know that they can rise above that and make something great.

Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense (Spence, Anecdotes

Writing does not exclude the full life; it demands it.

Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.

To me, jazz is a place where anything is possible.

Art, as I see it, is any human activity which doesn’t grow out of either of our species’ two basic instincts: survival and reproduction.

A book is a human fact; a great book like Seraphita gathers together numerous psychological elements. These elements become coherent through a sort of psychological beauty. It does the reader a service.