Top 100 Best Literature Quotes
#1. I think that the best literature has a core that you can't lock to a time or place but that can generate lots of meanings and translations.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#2. Reality is not an inspiration for literature. At its best, literature is an inspiration for reality.
Romain Gary
#3. My greatest influence has been the blues. And that's a literary influence, because I think the blues is the best literature that we as black Americans have.
August Wilson
#4. No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
#5. I nearly fell asleep over Dickens in English. Mind you, he's snoozeworthy at the best of times.
Jo Walton
#6. After a great deal of discussion in Soviet literature about the correct definition of a combination, it was decided that from the point of view of a methodical approach it was best to settle on this definition - A combination is a forced variation with a sacrifice.
Alexander Kotov
#7. Now we're guests in a faraway land nearly 40 years on.
No trees, no cool breeze,
no best friends.
Only endless days spent in sending SMSs...
Nabeel Philip Mohan
#8. If you ever meet someone who thinks they are so special, the best thing to do is smile. You don't have to say anything. Be friendly and then go do
your best. That will make you special, too!
Jeff Hutchins
#9. The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it ... we see literature best from the midst of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a high religion. The field cannot be well seen from within the field.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#10. 'Jane Eyre,' when I think of that book, it conjures up the best moments of college English courses. Literature is extraordinary, especially when you have a good professor.
Edward P. Jones
#11. The best thing about being a writer is that 'work' is always something you love, plus usually accompanied by tea, coffee and cakes of some sort.
Jamie L. Harding
#12. And what does a person with such romantic temperament seek in the study of the classics?
If by romantic you mean solitary and introspective, I think romantics are frequently the best classicists.
Donna Tartt
#13. The want of an international Copy-Right Law, by rendering it nearly impossible to obtain anything from the booksellers in the wayof remuneration for literary labor, has had the effect of forcing many of our very best writers into the service of the Magazines and Reviews.
Edgar Allan Poe
#14. It is probably true that business corrupts everything it touches. It corrupts politics, sports, literature, art, labor unions and so on. But business also corrupts and undermines monolithic totalitarianism. Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment.
Eric Hoffer
#15. Illusion is whatever is fixed or definable, and reality is best understood as its negation ...
Northrop Frye
#16. The best thing is to walk on the right path without looking back, without knowing who is following you because you must walk with your own speed, with your own freedom! Your followers will catch you or your ideas somehow somewhere ahead, somewhere in time!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#17. Delicacy - a sad, sad false delicacy - robs literature of the two best things among its belongings: Family-circle narratives & obscene stories.
Mark Twain
#19. Despite your best efforts, you could not invent a better police force for literature than criticism and the author's own conscience.
Anton Chekhov
#20. Potential enemies make the best friends and lovers. Many a blessed union begins in adversity.
Randy Thornhorn
#21. I have never had the lust to meet famous authors; the best of them is in their books.
Michael Gold
#22. Half the time, in this life, you wouldn't know where you are nor when. There are moments of unpleasant liveliness. Tamp that the fuck down is best.
Kevin Barry
#23. Reading great works of literature, discovering poetry, and listening to the best composers are all ways that we learn to love the Creator more.
Jennifer A. Marshall
#24. Jane Austen may not be the best writer, but she certainly writes about the best people. And by that I mean people just like me.
Anna Quindlen
#25. Understand is not the word; you are right, you can never really 'understand' about someone, anyone, even yourself. It is best to believe in them as human; feel that they are alive like you and need warmth, concern.
Rudy Wiebe
#26. A skunk is walking by. Skunks don't hurry or hide. The dogs and cats pretend not to notice them. It is best not to.
Alice Provensen
#27. We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.
Vladimir Nabokov
#28. I would rather do a good hours work weeding than write two pages of my best; nothing is so interesting as weeding. I went crazy over the outdoor work, and at last had to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by the board.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#29. Anything can become a children's book if you give it to a child ... Children are actually the best (and worst) audience for literature because they have no patience with pretence.
Orson Scott Card
#30. I lead no party; I follow no leader. I have given the best part of my life to careful study of Islam, its law and polity, its culture, its history and its literature.
Muhammad Iqbal
#31. The policemen agreed they were living with a most peculiar fellow. One moment he was reading classical literature in the original French and quoting Tennyson, and the next he would be discussing the best way to blow up a train.
Ben Macintyre
#32. Kim Newman's Anno Dracula is back in print, and we must celebrate. It was the first mash-up of literature, history and vampires, and now, in a world in which vampires are everywhere, it's still the best, and its bite is just as sharp. Compulsory reading, commentary, and mindgame: glorious.
Neil Gaiman
#33. I did best when I had least truth for my subjects.
John Donne
#34. Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.
William Ralph Inge
#35. The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called 'significant literature' will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles.
Raymond Chandler
#36. We are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence.
William Butler Yeats
#37. It is the best way to write poetry, letting things come. -Winnie-the-Pooh
A.A. Milne
#38. The best thing you can give to a child is to create an environment where the child can develop an independent mind so that he will be the man of no one and the instrument of no system!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#39. My first true lesson in writing came from Mr. Bowden when I was 16. At my high school, he was the teacher known to be the very best at literature and writing.
Jeff Lindsay
#40. What makes human life meaningful? I still felt literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain.
Paul Kalanithi
#41. Theatre for a New Audience is one of America's most admirable and exciting theatre companites ... some of the best acted and directed work to be found on American stages, engaging with the canon of world dramatic literature in a vigorous way.
Tony Kushner
#42. At the age of 12 I won the school prize for Best English Essay. The prize was a copy of Somerset Maugham's 'Introduction To Modern English And American Literature.' To this day I keep it on the shelf between my collection of Forester's works and the little urn that contains my mother's ashes.
Wilbur Smith
#43. Everything that is printed and bound in a book contains some echo at least of the best that is in literature.
Henry David Thoreau
#44. A deus ex machina will never appear in real life so you best make other arrangements.
Marisha Pessl
#45. It also seems that the unhappy writers are the enduring writer. Hampered or limited by their suffering, literature becomes their focus and salvation, forcing them to give their best every moment of creation. Writing becomes their medicine, their way of escape, the catalyst for their imagination.
Cirilo F. Bautista
#46. Literature can allow us to experience the best side of humankind, where instead of giving up, we struggle desperately in the ruins for love, connection and hope.
Caroline Leavitt
#47. I've always loved literature, and the best books I read were always trilogies.
Dawn Angelique
#48. For centuries censorship has created best sellers because, as Michel de Montaigne said, 'To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.' (Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature)
Margaret Bald
#49. Literature is an invitation to people to discover the world of others and the world of others is the best source to understand and to improve our own world!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#50. I love literature deeply. I view books as sacred things, and in writing my story, I'm going to do my best to honor the form that has played such a huge part in shaping who I am.
Flea
#51. In 1935, Faber & Faber published an anthology entitled 'My Best Western Story' in which the genre's leading practitioners contributed what they considered their finest. Alas, literature the stories ain't; they appear more like fossils from a spent mine.
Clive Sinclair
#52. There's a history of English literature where the best boils to the top, and Jane Austen stands right at the top of that.
JJ Feild
#53. To my mind that literature is best and most enduring which is characterized by a noble simplicity.
Mark Twain
#54. A taste for the best reading is not cultivated in Spanish girls, even where the treasures of that great Castilian literature are accessible to them.
Katharine Lee Bates
#55. [B]ut in literature, it should be remembered, a thing always becomes his at last who says it best, and thus makes it his own.
James Russell Lowell
#56. You get below the Mason-Dixon line and you have some of the best music, culture, the two races, the literature, and it's so rich.
Robert Duvall
#57. Besides being witty and funny and maybe the best novel ever written, it's also the most perfect romance in all of literature and nothing in life can ever measure up, so I spend my life limping in its shadow.
Shannon Hale
#58. And I had just kissed my ex-girlfriend, who had cried, while my current girlfriend was in jail. So far, it had not been my best day.
Mark Zero
#59. The best safeguard against bad literature is a full experience of good; just as a real and affectionate acquaintance with honest people gives a better protection against rogues than a habitual distrust of everyone.
C.S. Lewis
#60. The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend upon it for their daily bread, and the highest form of literature, poetry, brings no wealth to the singer. For producing your best work also you will require some leisure and freedom from sordid care.
Oscar Wilde
#61. I must warn you that the books I like are not necessarily the ones I think are the best. I like them for various reasons not always easy to explain.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#62. I want to kill every best-seller list and encourage Americans to discover for themselves inspired new literature that will endure in perpetuity. Let's pluck from squalid obscurity underground, and publish, the next Hemingways, Fitzgeralds, Morrisons, Bellows, Barths, Vonneguts and Faulkners.
David B. Lentz
#63. 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
#64. Love, it is said, is blind, but love is not blind. It is an extra eye, which shows us what is most worthy of regard. To see the best is to see most clearly, and it is the lover's privilege.
J.M. Barrie
#65. The popular culture gives us books that offer entertainment but no ideas. High culture gives us books that offer ideas but no entertainment. The best books manage to do both.
Gene Edward Veith Jr.
#66. Don Quixote is the best book out there on political theory, followed by Hamlet and Macbeth. There is no better way to understand the tragedy and the comedy of the Mexican political system than Hamlet, Macbeth and Don Quixote. They're much better than any column of political analysis.
Subcomandante Marcos Laura Castellanos
#67. Of course, at their best, movies are anti-literature and, as a medium, belong not to writers, not to actors, but to directors.
Truman Capote
#68. Young man! If my notes should fall into your hands, remember that the best and most enduring changes are those which stem from an improvement in moral behaviour, without any violent upheaval.
Alexander Pushkin
#69. People may think of Southern humor in terms of missing teeth and outhouse accidents, but the best of it is a rich vein running through the best of Southern literature.
Roy Blount Jr.
#70. the whole point of literature, I think, is that it's the best technology we have for communicating what another person's life feels like from the inside.
Garth Greenwell
#71. The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only the best of what has been written.
Harold Bloom
#72. Really good literature is seldom appreciated in its own day. The best authors die poor, the bad ones make money - it's always been like that.
Walter Moers
#73. Reading is the gateway to so many things that helps makes it possible for seven billion people to live together on one planet. Literature is the great extra-somatic keeper of our knowledge of what it is to be human. Reading elevates us. We read to be our best selves.
Nicola Griffith
#74. The most advertised commodity is not always intrinsically the best; but is sometimes merely the product of a company, with plenty of money to spend on advertising.
Emily Post
#75. Literature is always best when it is celebrating its subjects darkly ... And because it is often by describing the thing lost - a family, a moment of happiness, a child, a father - that we understand the full weight of what we had.
Bill Buford
#76. The story [Henny-Penny] has the best opening in all literature-"The sky is falling," cried Henny-Penny, "and a piece of it fell on my tail.
John Steinbeck
#77. Holden Caulfield is the best character in literature, period.
Josh Hutcherson
#78. 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
#79. I do not just want you at your best.
I almost do not care
where your Happiness lives,
but please,
let me visit your pain?
Take me to the place
where your sadness goes,
and show me the tragedy
that no one knows.
Meraaqi
#80. I shall tell you what I believe. I believe God is a librarian. I believe that literature is holy ... it is that best part of our souls that we break off and give each other, and God has a special dispensation for it, angels to guard its making and its preservation.
Sarah Smith
#81. It's the best way of telling the truth; it's a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts. Beyond that ... [it's] delight in, and play with, language; also, a curiously intimate way of communicating with people whom you will never meet.
Julian Barnes
#82. The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#83. Science fiction and fantasy literature has always been defined by tales of heroism. It is meant to represent humanity at our very best, willing to oppose all odds in order to protect the side of good.
Mira Grant
#84. America is a nation of liars, and for that reason science fiction has a special claim to be our national literature, as the art form best adapted to telling the lies we like to hear and to pretend we believe.
Thomas M. Disch
#85. The best books - like the best music or television or movies or comics or video games - can challenge us and force us to think or perceive aspects of life that we may prefer to avoid. In a sense, they threaten us.
Geoffrey Reiter
#86. Literature offers us all, writers and readers, the best method of discovering and retelling the changing story of ourselves. The story is both journey and surprise. And as everyone knows, even the past is altered, depending on, not the facts, but the interpretation.
Jeanette Winterson
#87. Without a sense of place the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego.
William Kennedy
#88. A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.
Siri Hustvedt
#89. What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I'm someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.
Paulo Coelho
#90. The important thing is to do what you most love in the best way. If you love literature, you could be a great writer and perhaps one day become a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature.
Aaron Ciechanover
#91. One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.
George Saintsbury
#92. Reading books is a way for you to communicate with and learn from the best thinkers that are writing today and that have ever lived.
Joshua Rogers
#93. People who think literature should be Serious - should serve as a blueprint for a rocket that will never take off - are malevolent at best, anti-Semitic at worst.
Gary Shteyngart
#94. The habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#95. The gamble of literature is that I make the best work I can; the most truthful, the most representative of how I see things. I try and do that, and then I put it out there and say to you, 'What do you think?' I hope that you think well of it, obviously.
Salman Rushdie
#96. These weren't cheap modern books; these were books bound in leather, and not just leather, but leather from clever cows who had given their lives for literature after a happy existence in the very best pastures.
Terry Pratchett
#97. If conversation be an art, like painting, sculpture, and literature, it owes its most power charm to nature; and the least shade of formality or artifice destroys the effect of the best collection of words.
Henry Theodore Tuckerman
#98. Literature is the noblest of all the arts. Music dies on the air, or at best exists only as a memory; oratory ceases with the effort; the painter's colors fade and the canvas rots; the marble is dragged from its pedestal and is broken into fragments.
Elbert Hubbard
#99. Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.
David Brin
#100. There are still some people out there who believe comic books are nothing more than, well, comic books. But the true cognoscenti know graphic novels are - at their best - an amazing blend of art literature and the theater of the mind.
John Ridley
