A Literary Quotes

#1. You should prefer a good scientist without literary abilities than a literate one without scientific skills

Leonardo Da Vinci

#2. If you want to be a good lair, tell people what they want to hear. (From Hot dogs under The Dakota)

Johannes Gouws

#3. Habits of literary composition are perfectly familiar to me. One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that a man can possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas. Immense privilege! I possess it. Do you?

Wilkie Collins

#4. I think that the idea that I'm writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There's even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#5. Hell, everybody is a masochist. Some of us are just a little more private.

Cecil Brown

#6. Slavery is the parent of ignorance, and ignorance begets a whole brood of follies and vices; and every one of these is inevitably hostile to literary culture.

Hinton Rowan Helper

#7. I don't divide my reading into demographic categories, any more than I'd divide my friends into groups along ethnic or sexual lines. The thing I look for most is a sense of literary rawness - bareback fiction, if you will.

Christopher Fowler

#8. It's no such thing! she said. It's friendship! And if you're a man who can't tell friendship from charity, then you're to be pitied!

Bette Lee Crosby

#9. The uncanny is not a literary genre. But nor is it a non-literary genre. It overflows the very institution of literature. It inhabits, haunts, parasitizes the allegedly non-literary. It makes 'genre' blink.

Nicholas Royle

#10. I am an artist, and, through my eye, must confess to a tremendous bias. In my purely literary voyages my eye is always my compass.

Wyndham Lewis

#11. It is the glory of London that it is always ending and beginning anew, and that a visitor, with a good eye and indefatigable feet, will find in her travels all the Londons she has ever met in the pages of books, one atop the other, like the strata of the Earth.

Anna Quindlen

#12. I can't do no literary work for the rest of this year because I'm meditating another lawsuit and looking around for a defendant.

Mark Twain

#13. The stereotype of the supercrip, in the eyes of its critics, represents a sort of overachieving, overdetermined self-enfreakment that distracts from the lived daily reality of most disabled people.

Jose Alaniz

#14. Horror. I can't manage it. I become
well
horrified. Self-help books have a similar effect.
When asked, "Any literary genre you simply can't be bothered with?" - (By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from the NYT Book Review, by Pamela Paul)

Emma Thompson

#15. A religion is really a moral code that is expressed through legends, myths or any type of literary device in order to establish a system of beliefs, values and rules with which to regulate a culture or society

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#16. The ultimate act of heroism shouldn't be death. You're always saying you want to give Baz the stories he deserves ... So you're going to kill him off? Isn't the best revenge supposed to be a life well-lived? The punk-rock way to end it would be to let them live happily ever after.

Rainbow Rowell

#17. It was only much later that he was made flesh and blood [in the Gospels] on paper. Thus Christ was created as a literary creation.

Paul Louis Couchoud

#18. I have been told by a member of the board of one of Canada's most prominent literary magazines that a submission of mine once caused a great deal of controversy.

John Barton

#19. Mankind is immortal
in the comic perspective not by virtue of man's subjugation of nature
but by virtue of man's subjection to it. The "fall" in tragedy ends in
death; the fall in comedy ends in bed, where, by natures's arithmetic,
one and one make a brand new one.

Rose A. Zimbardo

#20. I thought it was a glorious thing to be a critic and to be a literary editor, and one was really doing something that mattered: to keep up standards, to take books seriously.

Claire Tomalin

#21. I have always been a big fan of the character and am more of a moviegoer than a comic book guy, there is always something about the character of Batman that is very elemental. There is a great powerful myth to the character and romantic element that draws from a lot of literary sources

Christopher Nolan

#22. So poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their oeuvres.

Wislawa Szymborska

#23. When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

Joyce Carol Oates

#24. I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of life are not merely mistaken, but evil, and yet, from a purely literary viewpoint, on his own terms, I have to evaluate him as a good writer.

Ayn Rand

#25. Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.

John Updike

#26. Notoriety and public confession in the literary form is a frazzler of the heart you were born with, believe me.

Jack Kerouac

#27. The literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview.

Martin Amis

#28. I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.

Toni Morrison

#29. In the literary as well as military world, most powerful abilities will often be found concealed under a rustic garb.

Pliny The Elder

#30. Once more I can climb about and remind you that a woman in this epoch does the important literary thinking.

Gertrude Stein

#31. A life spent largely among books, and in the exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a subject-matter, when one comes to write about it.

Mary Augusta Ward

#32. No one knows the nature of God, or even if God exists. In a sense, all of our religions are literary works of the imagination.

Alan Lightman

#33. Finn lowers his voice to a confidential whisper. 'Arabella was
my first literary infatuation. I had a mad crush on her.

Jessica Spotswood

#34. The literary man has a circle of the chosen few who read him and become his only public ... What more natural than that he should write for those who, even if they do not pay him, at least understand him?

Amado Nervo

#35. Literary influences are harder for me to point to, because mostly it's a mulch of all of my past reading.

Jeff VanderMeer

#36. German writers in the late 18th century were the first to uphold a prickly, literary nationalism, in reaction to the then dominance and prestige of French literature.

Pankaj Mishra

#37. Anuj Bahari has always been a really good literary agent for me. What a good agent does is that he manages many of your business aspects so you can keep your time free for writing.

Amish Tripathi

#38. A man was leaning idly against an elm ... The man, who towered over the poet even at his slanting angle, too old for a student and too worn for a faculty member, stared at him with the familiar, insatiable gleam of the literary admirer.

Matthew Pearl

#39. I have a really good idea for a novel and would like to just kind of try my hand at fiction. I'm starting to kind of get a really good body of work going from a literary standpoint. As long as the audience is there, man, I'll keep cranking them out.

Corey Taylor

#40. Let the enemy fall by their swords. Words not worth reading die their own death. But our Words will be Told!

K.A. Gunn

#41. In theory it was, around now, Literature. Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.

Terry Pratchett

#42. No highbrow literary type would ever say 'Moby Dick' is good but it's just about a whale, or a Jane Austen would be important if she wasn't just writing about romantic relationships.

Sophie Hannah

#43. A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two.

Will Eisner

#44. There's a but, isn't there?" said Coraline. "I can feel it. Like a rain cloud.

Neil Gaiman

#45. I'm a child of the literary bent. I don't want to see 140 characters. I want to see a story.

Joanne Kelly

#46. You couldn't escape the literary atmosphere in our home. I grew up as a Britisher. I played a protagonist of every nationality in stage adaptations of Shakespeare and Brecht. I graduated from Yale. When I moved to the U.S., I realized with some amount of surprise that I was seen as an ethnic actor.

Satya Bhabha

#47. A public role endures for the literary high-command, as sages and seers, speaking out on social and political issues.

Tibor Fischer

#48. The charm of your writing," Evelyn Waugh once wrote to Mitford, "depends on your refusal to recognize a distinction between girlish chatter and literary language.

Nancy Mitford

#49. One learns little more about a man from the feats of his literary memory than from the feats of his alimentary canal.

Frank Moore Colby

#50. Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character - even its films, it's argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.

Will Self

#51. If literary fiction is reduced to only middle-class families dealing only with middle-class angst, then it's really finished as a force for grappling with the world.

J.M. Ledgard

#52. Perhaps the greatest lesson which the lives of literary men teach us is told in a single word* Wait!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

#53. If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.

Franz Kafka

#54. I could see now that a literary education did not fit one for the popular novelist's trade.Once you had started using words like flavicomous or acroamatic, because you liked the sound of them, you were lost.

Woodrow Wilson

#55. Notice the malice toward an independent man. Look back at your own life. Howard, and at the people you've met. They know. They're afraid. You're a reproach.

Ayn Rand

#56. I'm like a unicorn; I'm a midlist writer who hasn't done anything else but write. But because I wasn't amazingly famous, I didn't become Stephanie Meyer, or even a huge literary name like a Jonathan Franzen or a Joshua Ferris.

Gabrielle Zevin

#57. I wanted to do justice to texts that are in verse in their original, so I tried to invest my version with a comparable poetic power; hence even more literary fireworks there.

Hal Duncan

#58. I was the only child, and I know my father had certain thoughts about me. He was a lawyer and extremely literary, but he would have been much happier if I had wanted to be a lawyer, a scientist, an engineer. But what I wanted to do was read.

Robert Gottlieb

#59. Hash, x. There is no definition for this word - nobody knows what hash is.
Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.
Dictionary, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.

Ambrose Bierce

#60. Literary commercialism is lowering the intellectual standard to accommodate the purse and to meet a frivolous demand for amusement instead of for improvement.

Mary Baker Eddy

#61. When God lets loose a great thinker on this planet, then all things are at risk. There is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned to-morrow; nor any literary reputation or the so-called eternal names of fame that many not be refused and condemned.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#62. The hoary joke in the literary world, based on 'Dreams From My Father,' was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama, he could have made it as a writer.

James Fallows

#63. as the descendants of the Normans finally amalgamated with the English natives, the Anglo-Saxon language reasserted itself; but in its poverty it had to borrow hundreds of French words (literary, intellectual, and cultural) before it could become the language of literature.

Richard A. LaFleur

#64. I had to learn the image is not the word, which is a jolt for a literary soul. But it has served me well in terms of understanding plot, in terms of watching actors develop characters.

Rita Mae Brown

#65. A literary agent is nothing but a cheap salesman (or woman); while a writer is a cheap salesman (or woman) who also has to actually write the books.

John Hodgman

#66. I'm beyond thrilled to be working with Faber, whose literary history is second to none. And I'm even more excited to bring my books to a wider audience in the U.K.

John Corey Whaley

#67. The lawyer refused to tell me my brother's name, and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James - someone more talented than I: someone brilliant without even trying.

Mona Simpson

#68. [A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.

G.K. Chesterton

#69. What is the sign of every literary decadence? That life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, the page gains life at the expense of the whole - the whole is no longer a whole.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#70. Don't try it," he said. The mutant was reading my mind. "You, boy, you're a literary trainspotter ...

Will Self

#71. Underneath the ground
you can't hear a sound
not even the sweet falling rain
you might forget about tomorrow
forget about the swallows
but they won't forget you
they won't forget you

Karl P.T. Walsh

#72. (On literary festivals) When you go and see a band play live, you are watching it do on stage what it is meant to do. When you watch an author perform live, you are, most of the time, watching a dog walk on its hind legs.

Nicholas Lezard

#73. A book doesn't have to be a literary classic, of course, to change us forever.

Pico Iyer

#74. It takes a village to raise a child, they say, and it takes a community to raise a genius, no matter how singular the individual.

Orna Ross

#75. A mere literary man is a dull man; a man who is solely a man of business is a selfish man; but when literature and commerce are united, they make a respectable man.

Samuel Johnson

#76. I just want people to get lost in the story and at the end kind of sag and say, 'That was fun.' It's hardly my desire for them to sit and think, 'What a great literary image.'

Michael Palmer

#77. It might be an idea for all literary critics to read the books they analyse aloud - it certainly helps to fix them in the mind, while providing a readymade seminar with your audience.

Will Self

#78. Soon after I left university, I came up with another definition of a literary critic or would be critic: someoone who uses churlish towards the end of an article or review.

Gerald Murnane

#79. The latest literary discussions reflect a struggle between two artistic methods - romanticism and realism, with the latter clearly ascendant for the time being.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

#80. One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.

Daniel Day-Lewis

#81. (Feedback) People become addicted to it. That's why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.

Zadie Smith

#82. I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.

Elena Ferrante

#83. Mal Peet: "In terms of sustaining a literate and literary culture, the books we put into our children's hands are immeasurably more important than the latest works of high-profile novelists.

M.G. Harris

#84. I have a strange relationship with influences because mine are mostly literary or painters or poets, who I'll even quote. I don't do tributes to cinema.

Xavier Dolan

#85. I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.

Samuel Butler

#86. A literary mystery, a damsel in distress, and his rival deposed. If that doesn't get him here then he's not much of a knight in shining armor.

Charlie Lovett

#87. Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.

George Lucas

#88. What is commonly called literary history is actually a record of choices.

Louise Bernikow

#89. Your understanding and interpretation of [a novel] is undoubtedly unique ... and that is the real beauty of the relationship that joins readers, books and writers together in a literary trinity - a bookish triumvirate.

Briar Kit Esme

#90. Literary poetry in a painter is something special, and is neither illustration nor the translation of writing by form.

Paul Gauguin

#91. Alcatraz actually knows a person named Brandon Sanderson. That man, however, is a fantasy writer and is therefore prone to useless bouts of delusion in literary form.

Brandon Sanderson

#92. So much of the way books get classified has to do with marketing decisions. I think it's more useful to think of literary books and sci-fi/fantasy books as existing on a continuum.

Karen Russell

#93. Of course Nebraska is a storehouse of literary material. Everywhere is a storehouse of literary material. If a true artist were born in a pigpen and raised in a sty, he would still find plenty of inspiration for his work. The only need is the eye to see.

Willa Cather

#94. Anthologizing is a dusty sport, half antique hunting and half literary gossip fest, and I love it.

Michael Sims

#95. The logic of the photograph is neither verbal nor syntactical, a condition which renders literary culture quite helpless to cope with the photograph.

Marshall McLuhan

#96. I'm also very hopeful to continue my literary journey into the realm of children's books. To be able to read my kids a children's book that was inspired by them would be everything!

Trista Sutter

#97. A risk for a poet-novelist is imbalance: The poems can flatten into prose or lose their intensity of focus; the novels can stall amid lofty writing or literary preciousness and ignore the engine of plot and character.

Floyd Skloot

#98. Not having any drink about ain't the same as not understanding the need for one. Times like these change a body's perspective.

Samuel Snoek-Brown

#99. She's always suggesting books like a literary marriage broker, wedding readers to the titles just right for them.

Joseph Bruchac

#100. He takes a draw on a cigarette, blows out a smoky ghost. I reach to catch the phantom in my hands, but it eludes me. I've been trying to catch a ghost for as long as I can remember.

Brenda Sutton Rose