About Literature Quotes

#1. About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.

Virginia Woolf

#2. I don't have a problem working 14 hours a day and still have ears and have a brain to mix afterwards. But I don't have the same strength to actively pursue and stay enthused about things like literature and movies and a social life - things that enhance the music, and the person.

Blake Mills

#3. That's the thing about living vicariously; it's so much faster than actual living.

Audrey Niffenegger

#4. And what is literature, Rabo," he said, "but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the universe but a few molecules who have the disease called 'thought'.

Kurt Vonnegut

#5. That's the great thing about literature
it makes the world less lonely.

Robert Stone

#6. Literature - Eastern and Western - abounds with stories, myths, legends about the search for youth, for eternal life.

F. Sionil Jose

#7. Give her books, where other people did all the running around and courting; it was far easier to read about such matters than to experience them herself.

Sophie Dash

#8. When literature becomes overly erudite, it means that interest in the art has gone and curiosity about the artist is what's important. It becomes a kind of idolatry.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

#9. Our desire to say more grows bigger and what to say about it, except that saying is not always about saying, growing is not always about growing.

Dejan Stojanovic

#10. There is nothing like literature: I lose a cow, I write about her death, and my writing pays me enough to buy another cow.

Jules Renard

#11. Of everything
I have ever endured,

Y
O
U

are
My Favourite Tragedy.

Meraaqi

#12. How does it happen that in life as in literature, rebellion, however pure, has something false about it, whereas resignation, however tainted with listlessness, always gives the impression of authenticity

Emil Cioran

#13. It's a heartening fact about the human race that utopian fiction precedes dystopian fiction in the evolution of literature.

Paul Di Filippo

#14. I had studied Russian in college. I had gotten into it first through literature and then just really found it kind of fascinating; of course, this was during the Cold War. So they were kind of the other great enemy that you grew up hearing about.

Scott Shane

#15. There is only one story.

Thomas C. Foster

#16. Education for women is something that has plagued the world for a very long time. When I saw this problem firsthand, I knew I had to write about it.

Sahndra Fon Dufe

#17. The Hebrew Bible is the supreme example of that rarest of phenomena, a national literature of self-criticism. Other ancient civilisations recorded their victories. The Israelites recorded their failures. It is what the Mosaic and prophetic books are about.

Jonathan Sacks

#18. I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and ... ants. I can understand ants.

A.S. Byatt

#19. Everybody wants to have intimate conversations, but the smart fellows don't give out, only the fools. The smart fellows talk intimately about the fools, and examine them all over and give them advice.

Saul Bellow

#20. Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature.

Stieg Larsson

#21. The history of fiction is about family - an inexhaustible subject for literature. We are creatures driven by emotions that are on high display in intimate relations - inside the family.

Siri Hustvedt

#22. You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin , or even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things.

Walt Whitman

#23. I was so enthused with literature -- not stuck on literature, but in love with letters -- that I was easily inclined to bring all the conversations round to works I had read or fictitious characters from my readings about whom I loved to talk

Joseph Zobel

#24. I think it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance, or a beach book - in short, it's something unworthy of a serious critic's attention.

Jennifer Weiner

#25. Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path.

Edgar Allan Poe

#26. I do not think of literature as something confessional or therapeutic. I make sentences in order to be precise about experiences and things. I am urged by many things and no things in particular.

Per Petterson

#27. Martial (the main character of LOCUS SOLUS) has a very interesting conception of literary beauty: the work must contain nothing real, no observations about the world or the mind, nothing but completely imaginary constructions. These are in themselves ideas from an extrahuman world.

Pierre Janet

#28. The causes of crime are very complicated. But there is a very big literature, as you know, about single parenthood in crime, about race in crime, and about poverty in crime.

Bill Bennett

#29. I think literature reveals more about us than history does.

Susan Meissner

#30. I love to read about anger. A "feel bad" book always makes me feel good. And no other novel in the history of literature is more depressing than Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children.

John Waters

#31. Every object strives for its proper place. A book seeks to be near its truest admirer. Just as this helpless moth seeks to be near the candle that infatuates him.

Vikram Seth

#32. The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.

Augusten Burroughs

#33. Being a professor and working are not the same thing. The academic community is composed largely of nitwits. If I may generalize. People who don't know very much about what matters very much, who view life through literature rather than the other way around.

Robert B. Parker

#34. Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art.

Erica Jong

#35. When you're used to being in dangerous situations, you develop a sixth sense about your surroundings, about where possible enemies might be lurking, how many steps it will take to reach the next corner on a dead run, the best hiding places if bullets start to fly...

Mark Zero

#36. The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives.

W.G. Sebald

#37. It's not that war crimes stop as soon as a novel about them is published. Literature operates slowly, it is always inching toward bliss, never quite getting there.

Aleksandar Hemon

#38. An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.

Roger Ebert

#39. Tricked by desire, mastered by love, rescued by beloved!
What else you want to know about humans?

Saurabh Sharma

#40. The thing I love about reporting is being able to blend in with any group, whether that's neo-Nazis or pedophiles.

Anderson Cooper

#41. She believed being so free with her sexuality was empowering, but I wouldn't say taking home a douchebag who would laugh about the encounter with his friend later is a step forward in the feminist movement.-Lily

Teresa Lo

#42. Yet the special thing about literature, the major art form of a Western civilization now ending before our very eyes, is not hard to define.

Michel Houellebecq

#43. You might like that one. But I'll tell you the same thing I tell my students when they complain about the depressing nature of American literature: life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly ( ... )

Matthew Quick

#44. A constant discomfort derives from this--writing these sentences, or any other for that matter--I am writing an ad for the war. With that, every utterance about freedom finishes.

Semezdin Mehmedinovic

#45. There are significant moments in everyone's day that can make literature. That's what you ought to write about.

Raymond Carver

#46. It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned.

David Foster Wallace

#47. What we value about music and literature are the moments that they create in our minds when we encounter them.

Stephan Jenkins

#48. So often, literature about African people is conflated with literature about African politics, as if the state were somehow of greater import or interest than the individual.

Taiye Selasi

#49. When it comes to literature, we are all groping in the dark, even the writer. Especially the writer. And that is a good thing
maybe one of the best things about literature. It's always an adventure of some kind.

Wendy Lesser

#50. I like presenting ambiguous situations. It seems to me a great part of our inner and outer lives are ambiguous, if we're honest about it. Maybe I'm a realist, in that respect.

Eric Basso

#51. Children's and YA books are about being brave and kind, about learning wisdom and love, about that journey into and through maturity that we all keep starting, and starting again, no matter how old we get. I think that's why so many adults read YA: we're never done coming of age.

Betsy Cornwell

#52. Imagine getting to be one of those people who actually gets paid to talk about literature.

Gabrielle Zevin

#53. People who are strangers to liquor are incapable of talking about literature.

Mo Yan

#54. For years, I had heard about the lack of interest in literature in the U.S. and I had complained about it. I failed to understand how people could fail to be moved by art.

Rita Dove

#55. Ever read this?"
"Let's cut corners. To hell with literature. You're clever and I'm beautiful. Now let's talk about who we really are.

John Fowles

#56. Women from fashion magazines, they hate other women. They like to tell other women they are ugly and often it works. Women's magazines are mostly about the outside and not about the inside. About make-up instead of arts and literature. Its such a shame.

Oliviero Toscani

#57. If you can't really have a conversation with someone candidly about it it's something that you'll always have something to learn from when it comes to taking a literature class.

Elizabeth Olsen

#58. I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.

Leslie Fiedler

#59. We really didn't have any literature telling us it was a good thing to be a woman artist. When I was trained, there were no precedents, and that was something to get really angry about.

Miriam Schapiro

#60. I regretted making a comment about Dave Eggers. I've never said anything about McSweeneys except that I admire what it is, and I think it's great that they keep people interested in literature.

James Frey

#61. There is nothing political about American literature.

Laura Bush

#62. I study English literature but my friends are doing psychology and things like that. No one cares about acting there. It's not competitive and it's a nice environment for me.

Yasmin Paige

#63. Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.

Thomas McGuane

#64. I'm a sucker for any band named after a work of literature. Los de Abajo take their name from Mariano Azuela's famous novel 'The Underdogs,' and that says a lot about who they are and the music they make.

Daniel Alarcon

#65. Science fiction is the literature of dreams, and texts concerning dreams always say something about the dreamer, the dream interpreter, and the audience.

Ken Liu

#66. Without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer.

Jose Saramago

#67. The thing American people fear about corporations is that they might achieve too much power. We have an antipathy to power even as we admire it.

Annie Proulx

#68. I sort of mind living in a time when most of the literature is terribly personal. I suppose it's because I grew up on a love of history, philosophy, science and religion, but not to think too much about yourself.

A.S. Byatt

#69. Beauty doesn't have to be about anything. What's a vase about? What's a sunset or a flower about? What, for that matter, is Mozart's Twenty-third Piano Concerto about?

Douglas Adams

#70. A form of art that I like is portraiture. I've been thinking about portraiture, and its relationship to writing and literature, biography and autobiography, and so that will be my next thing.

Robert Dessaix

#71. For me, there was no great myth around the movies when I was a young child. My father was very simple about the whole thing. He did not consider cinema an art. Cinema was entertainment. Literature and music were art.

Jacques Audiard

#72. Like most people, I have several pet subjects - that may or may not be interesting to other people. Don't get me started on happiness, or habits, or children's literature, or Winston Churchill, unless you really want to talk about it.

Gretchen Rubin

#73. A small amount of good literature can often teach more about the inner life than volumes of psychology.

Thomas Moore

#74. In literature classes, you don't learn about genes; in physics classes you don't learn about human evolution. So you get a fragmented view of the world. That makes it hard to find meaning in education.

David Christian

#75. You never seem to hear about psychic occult attack in spiritual literature. This knowledge has been conveniently forgotten.

Frederick Lenz

#76. I don't hate language. I have my own language, but I also enjoy the English language. Obviously, you don't read a lot of literature and not care about language.

Twyla Tharp

#77. Angel of Fire is about an ordinary boy to whom extraordinary things happen

Wendy Milton

#78. Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.

Laurie Anderson

#79. I don't think there are actually any theologians practicing angelology or studying angels anymore, but it's definitely in a lot of religious literature. It's still out there, and people are still interested. Even in the more secular way, books about angels are everywhere.

Danielle Trussoni

#80. As a literary composition, it is utterly worthless, and could be admired only by persons who know nothing about literature. As for its giving offence, that is the very thing I intended it to do.

Ethel Lilian Voynich

#81. There are those who believe we have need of more literature, of a large international publishing house, of a great peace newspaper, or the like. I am rather skeptical about this idea.

Fredrik Bajer

#82. All the latchkey children cursed and smashed bottles, teased about underwear, and puffed on those unfiltered cigarettes that only the cowboys could roll.

Bremer Acosta

#83. This used to be about sex. The literature of my people was pornography, filled with cries for mercy, drama enacted on people without prolonged negotiation, partners engaged in a dance in the middle of a bonfire. Now, it's 300-page manuals about how to make sure nothing bad will happen.

Laura Antoniou

#84. I am always coming up with architectural metaphors when I think about writing. But I think one of the things that draw us to literature is that it gives us this very attractive illusion that there is meaning in the world - things connect.

Nicole Krauss

#85. What is literature, really? Boiled down to a single sentence, I'd say it's this: an endless conversation about what it means to be human. And to read literature is to engage in that conversation.

Nicole Krauss

#86. CHAPTER 10: For questions about librarians featured in erotic literature, you will find absolutely nothing in the public library.

Josephine Carr

#87. He is our man's-man of literature.

Andrew Barger

#88. He loved words, and he would admit that he was playing with them all the time. He was obsessive about the rhythm of the sentence, and would add a word, subtract a word. [about Truman Capote]

Deborah Kerr

#89. Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy. It's purpose is to discern the consequences of various ways of allocating resources which have alternative uses. It has nothing to say about philosophy or values, anymore than it has to say about music or literature.

Thomas Sowell

#90. I can always tell when I'm about to start writing. I go through cycles in reading. When I'm beginning to start to write something, I start reading what I think of as good literature. I read things with wonderful language.

Patricia MacLachlan

#91. A curious thing about written literature: It is about four thousand years old, but we have no way of knowing whether four thousand years constitutes senility or the maiden blush of youth.

John Barth

#92. I wanted to write plays. I was at Yale graduate school at the time for English literature, not for acting ... I liked the idea of collaboration, and I thought if I'm gonna write plays, I should learn something about speaking the lines that I might try to write.

David Duchovny

#93. I get upset about what is taken as great literature and what is cute and exotic.

Rabih Alameddine

#94. What do you think about America?"
"Everyone always smiles so big! Well - most people. Maybe not so much you. I think it looks stupid.

Donna Tartt

#95. We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing - by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature.

M.H. Abrams

#96. One reason I've never been a fan of graphic novels is because a central aspect of literature for me has always been imagining what the things I'm reading about look like.

Martin Filler

#97. I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.

Stephen Greenblatt

#98. I gradually became persuaded that the subjects, without intending to, had revealed to me a basic truth about markets that was foreign to the literature of economics.

Vernon L. Smith

#99. ... the primary trait of young adult literature is that the author's emphasis is on plot and character and not on his own brilliance. And because few people talk about whether a young adult work is commercial or literary; the two are still in sync, and everyone's benefitting.

Eliot Schrefer

#100. I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.

Per Petterson