"Reading is a full contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources. What results can sometimes be as much our creation as the nov..."
- Thomas C. Foster
"His argument runs like this: there is no goodness without free will. Without the ability to freely choose-or reject-the good, an individual possesses no control over his own soul, and without that con..."
"Real people are made out of a whole lot of things—flesh, bone, blood, nerves, stuff like that. Literary people are made out of words."
"We sometimes hear of the death of literature or of this or that genre, but literature doesn't die, just as it doesn't 'progress' or 'decay.' It expands, it increases. When we feel that it has become s..."
"The real reason for quest is always self-knowledge."
"Every language has a grammar, a set of rules that govern usage and meaning, and literary language is no different. It’s all more or less arbitrary of course, just like language itself."
"Literary works are not democracies. We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal. We may, but the country of Novels, Etc., doesn't. In that faraway place, no charact..."
"Reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer's alone."
"If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won't save it."
"History is story, too. You don't encounter her directly; you've only heard of her through narrative of one sort or another."