Writer's make national literature, while translators make universal literature.
Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise above its source, so it is true that a national literature cannot rise above the moral level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its inspiration.
A nation’s literature is the expression of a nation's mind in writing and the concentration of intellect for the purpose of spreading itself abroad and multiplying its energy
I am honored to have served as our great nation's first National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. I will continue to serve as Ambassador Emeritus. And I will make good on my Ambassadorial promise to my wife to stop playing the 'Fanfare' every time I walk into or out of a room.
I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.
I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.
England has two books, the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare,but the Bible made England.
I feel very connected to poets across the country.
If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
Every country has the writers she requires and deserves, which is why Nicaragua, in two hundred years of literacy, has produced one writer-a mediocre poet.
The establishment, the newspapers, they try to create something called Scottish literature, but when people are actually going to write, they are not going to necessarily prescribe to that, they'll write what they feel.
As far as the novel is concerned in my own country, I think it's in a pretty healthy state.
America has had much more respect for its writers because they had to define what America was. America wasn't sure what it was.
The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.
In order to have a literature, a nation must live, not merely on the practical, but on the moral and spiritual plane as well, contributing through its national life to the development of some side of the universal spirit of man.
A masculine education cannot spare from professional study and the necessary acquisition of languages, the time and attention which I have bestowed on the compositions of my countrymen.
I don't care if my books don't sell abroad; we have a large enough market in our country. I write for Indian readers.
Right from the very beginning, I knew I wanted to write palpably Scottish fiction.
I put it to you that there are no British poets, there are no British novelists. I have heard myself described as one, but I think really I'm an English novelist; there are Scottish poets and Scottish novelists.
The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.
Few nations match our rich resource of literature.
Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.
I've never seen an 'English' books section in, well, an English bookshop, but in Scotland, most bookshops have a set of shelves dedicated to Scottish authors.
There's nothing political about American literature.
I have always loved American poetry, which is very different from Irish poetry.
