Top 100 Good Literature Quotes
#1. She comes to naught, my dear one, she comes to naught, all that there business. What the hell, maybe twice in your life you have yourself a whore of a good time, and then you spend every night of the rest of your life trying to get that good time back. But she comes to naught.
Lynn Coady
#3. I think the genre of comics sometimes overtakes the medium, and people assume that they are kind of frivolous. If you have a good, strong story teller, they can be as affecting as any character in literature. Period.
Chip Kidd
#4. There is no book so bad it does not contain something good.
Pliny
#5. '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
#6. To those of you who study history, economics, sociology, literature and language I present the challenge of the utilization of the enormous resources in our grasp to the problem of creating a genuinely good life for yourselves and your children.
Polykarp Kusch
#7. When we no longer have good cooking in the world, we will have no literature, nor high and sharp intelligence, nor friendly gatherings, no social harmony.
Marie-Antoine Careme
#8. I soon realized that a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads: the most conscientious student will be continually misconstruing the implications, even the meaning.
Northrop Frye
#9. And 'tis a kind of good deed to say well:
And yet words are no deeds.
King Henry VIII. Act 3, Scene 2
William Shakespeare
#10. Naturally I drew register a little exaggerated, in order to create something new in the sense of a sublime literature that sings of despair only in order to oppress the reader, and make him desire the good as the remedy.
Comte De Lautreamont
#12. In theory it was, around now, Literature. Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.
Terry Pratchett
#13. Anger was buried far too early in a young heart, which perhaps contained much good.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#14. I object to publishers: the one service they have done me is to teach me to do without them. They combine commercial rascality with artistic touchiness and pettishness, without being either good business men or fine judges of literature.
George Bernard Shaw
#15. Good art is always dangerous, always open-ended. Once you put it out in the world you lose control of it; people will fit it into their minds in all sorts of different ways.
Greil Marcus
#16. How would you start to write a poem? How would you put together a series of words for its first line - how would you know which words to choose? When you read a poem, every word seemed so perfect that it had to have been predestined - well, a good poem.
Ashley Hay
#17. What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature?
Rex Stout
#18. I don't know anything that mars a good literature so completely as too much truth. Facts contain a great deal of poetry, but you can't use too many of them without damaging your literature.
Mark Twain
#19. Is he crazy? No one has ever told me my doodles are good, not that I flash them around or anything. Gen likes them, but she also thinks vampire romances are literature and sings along to 'Islands in the Stream.' Her tastes are dubious. She's not a reliable source.
Jules Barnard
#20. If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.
Ben Lerner
#21. It pains me to admit this, but Roger was a good sight less stupid than most children.
Heidi Schulz
#22. How far the existence of the Academy has influenced French literature, either for good or for evil, is an extremely dubious question.
Lytton Strachey
#23. 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.
George Orwell
#24. When we've decided to tell the truth in a story, we should tell good, strong versions of it, proper versions that kids can do something with.
Celine Kiernan
#25. Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.
Susan Griffin
#26. It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author's experience worked out literally.
Gore Vidal
#27. When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written.
George Saintsbury
#28. Climbing Jacob's Ladder is a gutsy, glowing account of one man's encounter with a potent spiritual practice and how it transformed his life. This is a precious book - that rare combination of solid wisdom and good literature.
Larry Dossey
#29. Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society.
Fay Weldon
#30. Good literature is a mirror through which we see ourselves more clearly.
Mark Frost
#31. All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.
Roman Payne
#32. The poet is a faker / Who's so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact.
Fernando Pessoa
#33. Why do people always wonder whether books are any good, without wondering whether they are themselves in a state to profit from them?
Idries Shah
#34. Axel smiled. "They say that good judgment comes from experience. And experience come from bad judgment." Alec laughed...
Ward Just
#35. He doesn't tell Aunt Fostalina she looks good, like I've heard other people do; he tells her she looks like sunrise.
NoViolet Bulawayo
#36. Not that the writers weren't good. I believe in those books and those writers very much. It's just that in the climate it's really hard to keep the lights on and the doors open when you're selling poetry and literature that appeals to a fringe audience.
Henry Rollins
#37. There's no better way to inform and expand you mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature.
Stephen R. Covey
#38. Good literature can be created only with something that is different from literature.
Italo Calvino
#39. Roald Dahl pioneered a new kind of literature for youngsters, one that dispensed with cant and solemnity, favoring anarchy and joy over duty and humbuggery while acknowledging that oftentimes no good deed goes unpunished. But ultimately, it was his sheer joie de vivre that carried the day.
Paul Di Filippo
#41. One of the first lessons that I hope you grasp is that woven into meaningful literature, so tightly that it can't be separated, is a telling lesson, even in stories as short as this one."
"Always?" I ask.
"Always!" she confirms. "Good stories teach!
Camron Wright
#42. Periods of rapid and fundamental change were never favourable for literature. Significant works, have nearly always and everywhere been created in periods of stability, be it good or bad.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#43. I am not opposed to e-readers. Any technology that encourages the reading of literature is a good thing.
Julia Glass
#44. People who are perfectly sane and happy don't make good literature, alas.
Colette
#45. School was rough for me. I was a good student in middle school, but high school wasn't so fun. I still pulled through, though! I excelled in art, fashion, history and English literature - anything creative. Math and science I struggled a bit more in.
India De Beaufort
#46. Trying too hard to be too good, even when trying to be bad, is too good for the bad, too bad for the good.
Dejan Stojanovic
#47. 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
#49. Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.
Sara Sheridan
#50. The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever 'solve'. Whether my answers are any good or not, they represent a fair amount of thinking about the questions.
Northrop Frye
#51. It is fortunate that Literature is in no ways injured by the follies of Collectors, since though they preserve the worthless, they necessarily defend the good.
Isaac D'Israeli
#52. The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.
Roland Barthes
#53. The novel succeeds on terms exclusive to literature. A good film succeeds on terms exclusive to the cinema. That's why so many bad novels can become good movies, like 'Jaws' or 'The Godfather.'
Alexander Payne
#54. Good writing is almost the concomitant of good history. Literature and history were joined long since by the powers which shaped the human brain; we cannot put them asunder.
C.V. Wedgwood
#55. Encourage good music and art and literature in your homes. Homes that have a spirit of refinement and beauty will bless the lives of your children forever.
Ezra Taft Benson
#56. Psychology, unlike chemistry, unlike algebra, unlike literature, is an owner's manual for your own mind. It's a guide to life. What could be more important than grounding young people in the scientific information that they need to live happy, healthy, productive lives? To have good relationships?
Daniel Goldstein
#57. Big Ma didn't need to say any more and she didn't. T.J. was far from her favorite person and it was quite obvious that Stacey and I owed our good fortune entirely to T.J.'s obnoxious personality.
Mildred D. Taylor
#58. The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#59. All of us use art and literature as an escape from time to time, but if it's any good, it has a healing quality - a quality that enlarges our human spirits.
Katherine Paterson
#61. And even though we may be involved with the most important affairs, achieve distinction or fall into some great misfortune- all the same, let us never forget how good we all once felt here, all together, united by such good and kind feelings as made us, too, ... perhaps better than we actually are.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#62. I think myself I ought to be shot for writing such nonsense ... But it's unquestionably good escapist literature and I think I should rather like it if I were sitting in an air-raid shelter or recovering from flu.
Georgette Heyer
#63. A cardinal principle of good fiction [is]: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated - as thoroughly integrated as mind and body or thought and action in a rational view of man.
Ayn Rand
#64. Such a beginning presaged nothing good. However, I lost neither courage nor hope. I turned to the consolation of all those in distress, and for the first time tasted the sweetness of prayer, poured forth from a pure but riven heart. I fell asleep serenely, unworried as to what was to become of me.
Alexander Pushkin
#65. My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.
Gene Wolfe
#66. Pornography is writing that seeks primarily, even exclusively, to bring about sexual stimulation. This can be done crudely or delicately. In the former case it would be bad literature; in the latter good.
Kenneth Tynan
#67. To encourage literature and the arts is a duty which every good citizen owes to his country.
George Washington
#68. None of the seven is really good, for the excellent reason that Australian children never are.
Ethel Turner
#69. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)
C.S. Lewis
#70. What good is a writer if he can't destroy literature? And us ... what good are we if we don't help as much as we can in that destruction?
Julio Cortazar
#71. When you tell a story in the kitchen to a friend, it's full of mistakes and repetitions. It's good to avoid that in literature, but still, a story should feel like a conversation. It's not a lecture.
Isabel Allende
#72. What a splendid thing is literature, what a splendid thing! It strengthens and instructs the heart of man. Literature is a sort of picture. It connotes at once passion, expression, fine criticism, good learning, and a document.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#73. With the windows in his top of the range Audi firmly in place we slowly baked ourselves and chatted over why my hatred of golf was wrong, what made a good antihero and why Paul McCartney should just fuck off.
David Louden
#74. In Holland, things were pretty stale for me. Even though there were a lot of good influences and a certain openness to music and art and literature, I just wanted to go somewhere less familiar - somewhere bigger.
Ari Marcopoulos
#75. Let's have some good, old-fashioned literature, with a virgin and a moral.
Mason Cooley
#76. The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
Alan Bennett
#77. As factual and thoughtful literature began to seep in, against the Nazis' will, and replace the reams of Nazi propaganda, I began to see the German Jew in his historical role, in his good as well as his bad light.
Martha Dodd
#78. 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
#80. Dualism ... Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life.
Aldous Huxley
#81. A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound.
Richard Flanagan
#82. What good literature can do and does do - far greater than any importation of morality - is touch the human soul.
Karen Swallow Prior
#83. I don't see myself as a very important person. But I was the second woman to write a novel in Iran, and I have written most of the novels about Iranian women. In this way, maybe I have a good place in Iranian literature.
Shahrnush Parsipur
#84. The Christian publishing world has embraced the safe over the good
J. Mark Bertrand
#85. The beauty of literature is you allow readers to see things through other peoples eyes. All good books do this.
Sandra Cisneros
#86. Chorus of women: [ ... ] Oh! my good, gallant Lysistrata, and all my friends, be ever like a bundle of nettles; never let you anger slacken; the wind of fortune blown our way.
Aristophanes
#87. I think Maus I is better than Maus II. The standard here is whether or not it's as good as a great book of prose literature and by that standard, no, it's not that great.
Ted Rall
#88. The core of literature is the idea of tragedy ... You don't really learn much from the good things that happen to you.
Cormac McCarthy
#89. I am home for good like a tiny shoot. The tiny shoots in my mother's garden. I have a passion for idle chatter about books, language and literature. Preparing a meal together, that can be romantic.
Abigail George
#91. When literature becomes deliberately indifferent to the opposition of good and evil it betrays its function and forfeits all claim to excellence.
Simone Weil
#92. Life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly. Literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for us to endure nobly.
Matthew Quick
#93. It's literature. It's all books. There are good books and bad books. Literary fiction can be bad, and so can sci-fi. Sci-fi can be wonderful and so can literary fiction. As long as it's a good book, who cares? Hold my attention; that's all I ask. Make me believe.
Margaret Atwood
#94. 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
#95. Shirley Jackson's writings are a must for aficionados of the gothic and of good literature.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#96. 'The Gambler' by Dostoevsky. It was the first time I realised that it was possible to have good and evil in one person. It led me to read a lot of Russian literature.
Sue Townsend
#97. The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
William Styron
#98. To become a 'good reader' one must give oneself over to a regime of concentrated pleasure. One does not set out to read a book a day (there is no necessary pleasure in that) but may spend two or three years on one book [. . .], read only portions of another, devour a third at a single sitting.
Michael Schmidt
#99. A child's imagination can be found in the heart of a good book.
K. Lamb
#100. A good novel is an indivisible sum: every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.
Ayn Rand
