Quotes About Heroes In Literature

#1. I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.

Jose Saramago

#2. I would ask: Given the nature of free-market capitalism - where the rule is to rise to the top at all costs - is it possible to have a financial industry hero? And by the way, this is not a pop-culture trend we're talking about. There aren't many financial heroes in literature, theater or cinema.

Martin Scorsese

#3. Boileau said that Kings, Gods and Heroes only were fit subjects for literature. The writer can only write about what he admires. Present-day kings aren't very inspiring, the gods are on a vacation and about the only heroes left are the scientists and the poor.

John Steinbeck

#4. Translators are the shadow heroes of literature.

Paul Auster

#5. I studied literature and Italian at Yale. I wrote my thesis about Italo Svevo, one of my heroes.

Nathaniel Rich

#6. There's a long history of anthropomorphic animals in Japanese literature. The so-called 'funny animal scrolls' were the first narratives in Japanese history, and the heroes of many folk tales have animals as their companions.

Stan Sakai

#7. If American literature has a few heroes, Miller is one of them. He refused to name names at the McCarthy hearings, and his play 'The Crucible' analysed the hearings in the context of a previous American mass psychosis, the Salem witch trials.

Jane Smiley

#8. Some Palaeolithic heroes survived in later mythical literature. The Greek hero Herakles, for example, is almost certainly a relic of the hunting period.

Karen Armstrong

#9. The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with the reader's lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that - not very appetizing - food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries.

Vladimir Nabokov

#10. It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.

Muhammad Ali

#11. I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected to Congress.

Norman Mailer

#12. I'm kind of hooked to the game of art and literature; my heroes are artists and writers.

Jim Morrison

#13. At all events, thanks to the work of Clair Patterson, by 1953 the Earth at last had an age everyone could agree on.

Bill Bryson

#14. You don't doubt that the lobby supporting the enactment of same sex-marriage laws in different states is politically powerful, do you? ... As far as I can tell, political figures are falling over themselves to endorse your side of the case.

John Roberts

#15. For it cannot, it cannot be, that a man should enjoy the benefit of grace except he watch.

John Chrysostom

#16. The Jews are among the aristocracy of every land; if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a national tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes.

George Eliot

#17. Literature throws us many great heroes. Real life invariably outdoes them.

Wilbur Smith

#18. Even an ice cream parlor - a definite advantage - does not alleviate the sorrow I feel for a town lacking a bookstore.

Natalie Goldberg

#19. I loathe it when they [English teachers] are bullied by no-nothing parents or cowardly school boards.

Pat Conroy

#20. We nurture the candle flames that show the way ahead. We are guerrillas of the word, unsung heroes breathing softly on the embers of the human mind, so that they might re-ignite the hearths around which we once found safe haven. The book is the Light and the Life.

Mark Cantrell

#21. Poetry is the fiery index to the genius of the age.

Babette Deutsch