Literature Quotes
Only the more rugged mortals should attempt to keep up with current literature.Literature
Age, George
Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.
Literature
Algren, Nelson
1909-1981 American Author
The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation.
Literature
Appelfeld, Aharon
1932 Israeli Novelist
If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor.
Literature
Auden, W. H.
1907-1973 Anglo-American Poet
Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
Literature
Bachelard, Gaston
1884-1962 French Scientist Philosopher Literary Theorist
Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.
Literature
Barthes, Roland
1915-1980 French Semiologist
In the present age, alas! our pens are ravished by unlettered authors and unmannered critics, that make a havoc rather than a building, a wilderness rather than a garden. But, a lack! what boots it to drop tears upon the preterit?
Literature
Beardsley, Aubrey
1872-1898 British Illustrator Writer
Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet, your works will contain them without your knowledge -- they will be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely.
Literature
Belinsky, Vissarion
The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.
Literature
Blair, Hugh
British Poet
Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.
Literature
Borges, Jorge Luis
1899-1986 Argentinean Author
A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug.
Literature
Borrow, George
1803-1881 British Author
All literature is political.
Literature
Burton, LeVar
American Actor
English literature is a kind of training in social ethics. English trains you to handle a body of information in a way that is conducive to action.
Literature
Butler, Marilyn
American Writer
The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
Literature
Calvino, Italo
1923-1985 Cuban Writer Essayist Journalist
When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign -- a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don t want to hear the word mentioned.
Literature
Calvino, Italo
1923-1985 Cuban Writer Essayist Journalist
All literature is gossip.
Literature
Capote, Truman
1942 American Author
There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
Literature
Carlyle, Thomas
1795-1881 Scottish Philosopher Author
When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball.
Literature
Chandler, Raymond
1888-1959 American Author
Speak of the moderns without contempt, and of the ancients without idolatry.
Literature
Chesterfield, Lord
1694-1773 British Statesman Author
The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
Literature
Cocteau, Jean
1889-1963 French Author Filmmaker
One learns little more about a man from his feats of literary memory than from the feats of his alimentary canal.
Literature
Colby, Frank Moore
1865-1925 American Editor Essayist
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.
Literature
Connolly, James
The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.
Literature
Drew, Elizabeth
1887-1965 Anglo-American Author Critic
Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished bride of quietness, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.
Literature
Eagleton, Terry
1943 British Critic
When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behavior by his attitude towards the result of the behavior arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way.
Literature
Eliot, T. S.
1888-1965 American-born British Poet Critic
People do not deserve to have good writings; they are so pleased with the bad.
Literature
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
1803-1882 American Poet Essayist
If you look at history you ll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict.
Literature
Erasmus, Desiderius
c1466-1536 Dutch Humanist
The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn t have needed anyone since.
Literature
Faulkner, William
1897-1962 American Novelist
To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.
Literature
Fischer, Ernst
1899-1972 Austrian Editor Poet Critic
Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst.
Literature
Ford, Ford Madox
1873-1939 British Novelist
In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.
Literature
Frye, Northrop
1912-1991 Canadian Literary Critic
Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.
Literature
Gide, Andre
1869-1951 French Author
Literature, as a field of glory, is an arena where a tomb may be more easily found than laurels; and as a means of support, it is the chance of chances.
Literature
Giles, Henry
The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency.
Literature
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von
1749-1832 German Poet Dramatist Novelist
One of the proud joys of the man of letters --if that man of letters is an artist is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world s memory.
Literature
Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De
1822-1896 French Writers
It is the story-teller s task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.
Literature
Greene, Graham
1904-1991 British Novelist
A people s literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.
Literature
Hamilton, Edith
1867-1963 American Classical Scholar Translator
A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate
Literature
Hampton, Christopher
1946 British Playwright
The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.
Literature
Havel, Vaclav
1936 Czech Playwright President
I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.
Literature
Havel, Vaclav
1936 Czech Playwright President
The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one s family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.
Literature
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
1804-1864 American Novelist Short Story Writer
It is a good lesson --though it may often be a hard one --for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world s dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of all significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.
Literature
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
1804-1864 American Novelist Short Story Writer
How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
Literature
Hemingway, Ernest
1898-1961 American Writer
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.
Literature
Hemingway, Ernest
1898-1961 American Writer
All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it. Many of the so-called politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently . Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness.
Literature
Hemingway, Ernest
1898-1961 American Writer
Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later. A man can be a Fascist or a Communist and if his outfit gets in he can get to be an ambassador or have a million copies of his books printed by the Government or any of the other rewards the boys dream about.
Literature
Hemingway, Ernest
1898-1961 American Writer
The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.
Literature
Hemingway, Ernest
1898-1961 American Writer
There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
Literature
Hemingway, Ernest
1898-1961 American Writer
The self-styled intellectual who is impotent with pen and ink hungers to write history with sword and blood.
Literature
Hoffer, Eric
1902-1983 American Author Philosopher
Literature flourishes best when it is half trade and half an art.
Literature
Inge, Dean William R.
1860-1954 Dean of St Paul's London
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
Literature
James, Henry
1843-1916 American Author
Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.
Literature
James, P. D.
1920 British Mystery Writer
The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper -- whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.
Literature
Jewett, Sarah Orne
1849-1909 American Author
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
Literature
Keller, Helen
1880-1968 American Blind/Deaf Author Lecturer Amorist
In the electronic age, books, words and reading are not likely to remain sufficiently authoritative and central to knowledge to justify literature.
Literature
Kernan, Alvin
1923 American Educator
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
Literature
Kundera, Milan
1929 Czech Author Critic
The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programs; or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold.
Literature
Kundera, Milan
1929 Czech Author Critic
Despair, feeding, as it always does, on phantasmagoria, is imperturbably leading literature to the rejection, en masse, of all divine and social laws, towards practical and theoretical evil.
Literature
Lautreamont, Isidore Ducasse, Comte De
1846-1870 French Author Poet
Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!
Literature
Lawrence, D. H.
1885-1930 British Author
Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.
Literature
Lawrence, D. H.
1885-1930 British Author
Literature must become party literature. Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat.
Literature
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich
1870-1924 Russian Revolutionary Leader
Literature is analysis after the event.
Literature
Lessing, Doris
1919 British Novelist
Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
Literature
Lewis, Sinclair
1885-1951 First American Novelist to win the Nobel Prize for literature
A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.
Literature
Lichtenberg, Georg C.
1742-1799 German Physicist Satirist
With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.
Literature
Lichtenberg, Georg C.
1742-1799 German Physicist Satirist
There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.
Literature
Llosa, Mario Vargas
1936 Latin American Author
The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who hands over to the words.
Literature
Mallarme, Stephane
1842-1898 French Symbolist Poet
Literature... is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most reliable of terms in which man names and transforms himself.
Literature
Man, Paul De
1919-1983 Belgian-born American Literary Critic
Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.
Literature
Man, Paul De
1919-1983 Belgian-born American Literary Critic
In literature, as in love, we are astonished at the choice made by other people.
Literature
Maurois, Andre
1885-1967 French Writer
It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important.
Literature
Mcewan, Ian
1948 British Author
For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.
Literature
Melville, Herman
1819-1891 American Author
That is a very good question. I don t know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?
Literature
Miller, Arthur
1915 American Dramatist
What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.
Literature
Miller, Henry
1891-1980 American Author
What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That s what their substance is.
Literature
Miller, Jonathan
1934 British Actor Director
A literary movement consists of five or six people who live in the same town and hate each other cordially.
Literature
Moore, George
1852-1933 Irish Writer
Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions.
Literature
Morley, John
1838-1923 British Journalist Biographer Statesman
Learning why one great book is just like every other great book is the key to understanding literature
Literature
Moschitta, John
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
Literature
Murdoch, Iris
1919 British Novelist Philosopher
I am not a literary man. I am a man of science, and I am interested in that branch of Anthropology which deals with the history of human speech.
Literature
Murray, Jim
American Author
There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however naïve that may have been, it was a good deal less naïve than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.
Literature
O'Connor, Flannery
1925-1964 American Author
The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
Literature
Orwell, George
1903-1950 British Author Animal Farm
The existence of good bad literature --the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one s intellect simply refuses to take seriously --is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.
Literature
Orwell, George
1903-1950 British Author Animal Farm
The truth is that literature, particularly fiction, is not the pure medium we sometimes assume it to be. Response to it is affected by things other than its own intrinsic quality; by a curiosity or lack of it about the people it deals with, their outlook, their way of life.
Literature
Palmer, Vance
1885-1959 Australian Author Poet
Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: You can t deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.
Literature
Pavese, Cesare
1908-1950 Italian Poet Novelist Translator
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.
Literature
Paz, Octavio
1914 Mexican Poet Essayist
Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!
Literature
Pirandello, Luigi
1867-1936 Italian Author Playwright
The cultivation of literary pursuits forms the basis of all sciences, and in their perfection consist the reputation and prosperity of kingdoms.
Literature
Pombal, Marques De
1699-1782 Portuguese Statesman
Literature is news that stays news.
Literature
Pound, Ezra
1885-1972 American Poet Critic
If a nation s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
Literature
Pound, Ezra
1885-1972 American Poet Critic
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Literature
Pound, Ezra
1885-1972 American Poet Critic
Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.
Literature
Pound, Ezra
1885-1972 American Poet Critic
The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
Literature
Pound, Ezra
1885-1972 American Poet Critic
The party of God and the party of Literature have more in common than either will admit; their texts may conflict, but their bigotries coincide. Both insist on being the sole custodians of the true word and its only interpreters.
Literature
Raphael, Frederic
1931 British Author Critic
Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.
Literature
Renard, Jules
1864-1910 French Author Dramatist
There can be no literary equivalent to truth.
Literature
Riding, Laura
1901-1991 American Poet
The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected.
Literature
Rushdie, Salman
1948 Indian-born British Author
The only privilege literature deserves -- and this privilege it requires in order to exist -- is the privilege of being in the arena of discourse, the place where the struggle of our languages can be acted out.
Literature
Rushdie, Salman
1948 Indian-born British Author
Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.
Literature
Rushdie, Salman
1948 Indian-born British Author
Just as the office worker dreams of murdering his hated boss and so is saved from really murdering him, so it is with the author; with his great dreams he helps his readers to survive, to avoid their worst intentions. And society, without realizing it respects and even exalts him, albeit with a kind of jealousy, fear and even repulsion, since few people want to discover the horrors that lurk in the depths of their souls. This is the highest mission of great literature, and there is no other.
Literature
Sabato, Ernesto
Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.
Literature
Sagan, Francoise
1935 French Novelist Playwright
If literature isn t everything, it s not worth a single hour of someone s trouble.
Literature
Sartre, Jean-Paul
1905-1980 French Writer Philosopher
Literature is the immortality of speech.
Literature
Schlegel, August Wilhelm Von
1767-1845 German Poet Critic
Leisure without literature is death and burial alive.
Literature
Seneca
4 BC – 65 AD Spanish-born Roman Statesman philosopher
In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.
Literature
Shaw, George Bernard
1856-1950 Irish-born British Dramatist
Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers -- such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.
Literature
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander
1918 Russian Novelist
Perversity is the muse of modern literature.
Literature
Sontag, Susan
1933 American Essayist
Remarks are not literature.
Literature
Stein, Gertrude
1874-1946 American Author
How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
Literature
Stevens, Wallace
1879-1955 American Poet
As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.
Literature
Stevens, Wallace
1879-1955 American Poet
Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Literature
Stevens, Wallace
1879-1955 American Poet
By and large the literature of a democracy will never exhibit the order, regularity, skill, and art characteristic of aristocratic literature; formal qualities will be neglected or actually despised. The style will often be strange, incorrect, overburdened, and loose, and almost always strong and bold. Writers will be more anxious to work quickly than to perfect details. Short works will be commoner than long books, wit than erudition, imagination than depth. There will be a rude and untutored vigor of thought with great variety and singular fecundity. Authors will strive to astonish more than to please, and to stir passions rather than to charm taste.
Literature
Tocqueville, Alexis De
1805-1859 French Social Philosopher
Already the writers are complaining that there is too much freedom. They need some pressure. The worse your daily life, the better your art. If you have to be careful because of oppression and censorship, this pressure produces diamonds.
Literature
Tolstaya, Tatyana
Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing -- he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.
Literature
Trilling, Lionel
1905-1975 American Critic
The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.
Literature
Trilling, Lionel
1905-1975 American Critic
Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
Literature
Trilling, Lionel
1905-1975 American Critic
The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.
Literature
Tzara, Tristan
1896-1963 Rumanian-born French Dadaist
I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author s political views.
Literature
Wharton, Edith
1862-1937 American Author
Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.
Literature
Wilde, Oscar
1856-1900 British Author Wit
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
Literature
Wilde, Oscar
1856-1900 British Author Wit
Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.
Literature
Wilde, Oscar
1856-1900 British Author Wit
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
Literature
Wilder, Thornton
1897-1975 American Novelist Playwright
Professors of literature, who for the most part are genteel but mediocre men, can make but a poor defense of their profession, and the professors of science, who are frequently men of great intelligence but of limited interests and education
Literature
Winters, Yvor
1900-1968 American Literary Critic
A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.
Literature
Woolf, Virginia
1882-1941 British Novelist Essayist
Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that
Literature
Woolf, Virginia
1882-1941 British Novelist Essayist