Foreign Literature Quotes

#1. It's quite clear : an outsider can, on principle, only value foreign literature that translates well; the truly great artists of language and the fecund experimenters are inaccessible to him; are usually unknown to him in fact !

Arno Schmidt

#2. Those were the good old days when educated Americans read foreign literature in translation, even works written in non-Western languages.

Minae Mizumura

#3. By the age of nine, I had a thorough knowledge of contemporary Polish literature as well as of foreign literature in Polish translation, and I began to write poems in honour of a lady of thirty years. Naturally, she knew nothing about them.

Wladyslaw Reymont

#4. Her manner was as though she were talking of a distant foreign literature. There was something lonely, something sad in it, something that rather suggested a beggar who has lost all desire.

Yasunari Kawabata

#5. I gradually became persuaded that the subjects, without intending to, had revealed to me a basic truth about markets that was foreign to the literature of economics.

Vernon L. Smith

#6. [T]he only luxury he allows himself is buying books, paperback books, mostly novels, American novels, British novels, foreign novels in translation, but in the end books are not luxuries so much as necessities, and reading is an addiction he has no wish to be cured of.

Paul Auster

#7. I wanted to walk away in denial, watch the news and believe the cat was faking the whole thing for attention.

Erika Lopez

#8. I guess you could say I've been writing all my life.

Anthony Doerr

#9. The knowledge of languages was very useful. I have a university degree in foreign languages and literature.

Emma Bonino

#10. Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.

Marilyn Hacker

#11. National independence, and the preceding political struggles, helped create the space for literary creation in many post-colonial countries. Much of modern Indian or Chinese literature is inconceivable without the political movement for freedom from foreign rule.

Pankaj Mishra

#12. It's the economics, that's why opera is not dying but gets more and more difficult to put on.

Christoph Waltz

#13. I don't buy 'regret' idea.
I need life's good lesson.

Toba Beta

#14. The problem with the economy isn't that people aren't paying their fair share of taxes.

Jon Lovitz

#15. I believe that there are too many practitioners in the church, who are not believers.

C.S. Lewis

#16. The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.

Ross Macdonald

#17. All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.

Carson McCullers

#18. Peter Kemp observed that 'Literature owes an enormous debt to Henry James's bowels.' As the correspondence revealed, the young Henry suffered from chronic constipation. To alleviate it his parents dispatched him on a grand tour of Europe (doubtless hoping the foreign food would loosen his entrails).

Anonymous

#19. I really, really wanted to write. I loved language. I loved literature. I loved reading. I never read a foreign language, I'm afraid, but I loved Flaubert. I loved the 19th-century classics. I love Thomas Hardy. I wanted to be a goof on a bus, but I wanted to write more.

Robert Stone

#20. A foreign country can best be understood through its literature.

Simone De Beauvoir