I think I was a good student because I jumped over a school. My main interest was basically history and literature. Sports were basically basketball and swimming at a pool. I was so happy.

When I arrived at Columbia I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry French history French literature.

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.

A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic a mere working mason if he possesses some knowledge of these he may venture to call himself an architect.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books history is silent literature dumb science crippled thought and speculation at a standstill.

I believe economic growth should translate into the happiness and progress of all. Along with it there should be development of art and culture literature and education science and technology. We have to see how to harness the many resources of India for achieving common good and for inclusive growth.

For Mythology is the handmaid of literature and literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.

Time the great destroyer of other men's happiness only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its possessor.

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

I never wanted to become an actress because I'd read great literature or seen great Shakespeare. It was more just wanting to understand what the people were really like why they said all the strange things they did.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

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

I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of my job but increasingly I found myself reading things that weren't really relevant to my academic work but were relevant to gardening.

There's a wealth of literature out there which hopefully will be you know exploded in the future and I personally find it very rewarding to be involved with classic storytelling and sort of legendary characters.

Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart the excision of its memory.

I tell my students it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see who's very far away who's a different color who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.