David Gelernter Quotes

Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.

Books that are books are all that you want, and there are but a half dozen in any thousand.

When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature.

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man.

Of all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books.

Poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere, and at all times, in hundreds and hundreds of men.

Books are an attempt to control something that's uncontrollable.

Great books are rare.

Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin - find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less.

I'm guilty of it myself, sort of thinking, 'Classic novels: snoozeville.' But there is a huge amount of wonderful material.

Would you ask Picasso to explain 'Guernica?' Would you ask Nabokov to explain 'Lolita?' Would you ask Tolstoy about 'War and Peace?' No, you wouldn't dare.

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

In 1945, just at the end of World War II, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote a remarkable book called The Life of Poetry. In it she says that on any particular day in the world, if poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day.

To have read the greatest works of any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter or musician, is a possession added to the best things of life.

In the end all books are written for your friends.

Each of my book arrives at a form and a style that is appropriate to the subject.

Being published is not a necessary validation or a path everyone wants to take with their work. Writing—and finishing—a novel is a great thing in itself, whether or not the book is published, or becomes widely-read or not.

Books are the liberated spirits of men.

Your goal is to write that masterpiece. Yello's masterpiece was "Oh Yeah." Whatever I say about the song doesn't matter, because it has a huge impact on how we remember the era.

The first among mankind will always be those who make something imperishable out of a sheet of paper, a canvas, a piece of marble, or a few sounds

Every person has a range. In fiction, you get to be it all. I’m as much the men in my book as I am the women. I write how I write and there is no mission to stake a claim.

There's still a fascination with somebody who can write at book length, no matter what the book is.

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.

Freedom does not guarantee masterpieces.

Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.