Top 100 Great Literature Quotes
#1. I never wanted to become an actress because I'd read great literature or seen great Shakespeare. It was more just wanting to understand what the people were really like, why they said all the strange things they did.
Julie Walters
#2. What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
E. M. Forster
#3. I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.
Harold Bloom
#5. There will still be things that machines cannot do. They will not produce great art or great literature or great philosophy; they will not be able to discover the secret springs of happiness in the human heart; they will know nothing of love and friendship.
Bertrand Russell
#6. It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born?
Jeff VanderMeer
#7. He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.
Stephen King
#8. Oldboy makes us feel a part of something bigger than ourselves. It's a grand, gritty, indelible experience, the sort of picture that mimics great literature in the way it envelops you in a well-told story while also evoking subtle but strong gradations of emotion.
Stephanie Zacharek
#9. The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.
Margaret Atwood
#10. Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#11. Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Ezra Pound
#12. C. S. Lewis said it this way: "In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. . . . I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do."12
Sarah Arthur
#13. Your father may never have produced one of those stuffy tomes we call great literature, but he left the world a substantial collection of delightful adventure stories.
David E. Fessenden
#14. It seemed to us philosophically self-evident that suicide was every free person's right: a logical act when faced with illness or senility; a heroic one when faced with torture or the avoidable deaths of others; a glamourous one in the fury of dissappointed love (see: Great Literature).
Julian Barnes
#15. When I was a kid, I went through the whole process of reading great literature and trying to be very widely read.
Terry Hayes
#16. 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.
Francoise Sagan
#17. Literature is the adventure. It's the story, it's the fight, it's people falling in love, it's people with deep personality disorders who succeed anyway beyond themselves. That's what great literature is.
Walter Mosley
#18. This is the thing about great literature. It reads like truth and sticks to you forever and lets you know that you are not alone.
Arlaina Tibensky
#19. The memoir by women, read by female readers, is considered a market form, not "great literature."
Kate Zambreno
#20. I doubt if anything learnt at school is of more value than great literature learnt by heart.
Richard Livingstone
#21. Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.
Shirley Hazzard
#22. When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.
James Earl Jones
#23. All great popular literature today one day will be seen as great literature and will no longer be seen as popular literature.
Walter Mosley
#24. A great literature is chiefly the product of inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation
H.L. Mencken
#25. Literature has done great work for feminism - writing and reading are a practice of empathy - and great literature will continue to do so.
Julianna Baggott
#26. When you read great literature, you become a thousand men and yet still be yourself.
C.S. Lewis
#27. Great language and great literature do not survive long without each other
Lance Conrad
#28. All great literature has an uncreeded and luminous theology behind it ... Art [is] a form of active prayer.
Melissa Pritchard
#29. In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself ... I see with a myriad of eyes,but it is still I who see.
C.S. Lewis
#30. All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.
Leo Tolstoy
#31. Great literature transcends its native land, but none that I know of ignores its soil.
J. Frank Dobie
#32. I think you can find all the elements that you can find in great literature in mundane experiences.
Harvey Pekar
#33. I was working in silence seeking no appreciation or respect from any one. And it is always the silence from which great literature is born.
Abhijit Naskar
#34. Inequality may linger in the world of material things, but great music, great literature, great art and the wonders of science are, and should be, open to all.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#35. I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
John Berryman
#36. Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that?
Kurt Vonnegut
#37. In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.
C.S. Lewis
#38. They should have a store next to the bookstore called the shit store where you can get shit books to read while on the shitter. No one reads great literature on the shitter.
Lewis Black
#39. Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes
Harold Bloom
#40. Nor did I make any distinctions between great literature and any other kind. I just liked reading.
Margaret Atwood
#41. No one bothered reading the books and understanding - and again, I'm not being high-falutin' about it - but I think our books are great literature with great metaphors of real life dealing with fears and hopes.
Avi Arad
#42. But why," he said with animation, "do the English not read their own great literature?"
Victor laughed triumphantly, and said, "Because at school they are made to hate it.
Olaf Stapledon
#43. Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.
A.E. Housman
#44. What great literature does best is to show us those moments which make life worth living.
Marty Rubin
#45. What's strange is how many beginning writers seem to think that grammar is irrelevant, or that they are somehow above or beyond this subject more fit for a schoolchild than the future author of great literature.
Francine Prose
#46. In a sense much great literature is subversive, since its very existence implies that what matters is art, imagination, and truth. In what we call the real world, on the other hand, what usually counts is money, power, and public success.
Alison Lurie
#47. [Great literature] lifts you out of the here and now and brings you closer to the angels.
Allison Burnett
#48. Besides," he said breezily, "were it not for misunderstandings, we would be sadly lacking in great literature."
She looked at him questioningly.
"Where would Romeo and Juliet be?"
"Alive.
Julia Quinn
#49. There can be no great literature in America until her writers have learned to trust her implicitly and love her devoutly.
Ernest Hemingway,
#50. I get upset about what is taken as great literature and what is cute and exotic.
Rabih Alameddine
#51. Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings.
Russell Kirk
#52. I'm not writing great literature. I'm writing commercial fiction for people to enjoy the stories and to like the characters.
Kathy Reichs
#53. We knew from our reading of great literature that Love involved Suffering, and would happily have got in some practice at Suffering if there was an implicit, perhaps even logical, promise that Love might be on its way.
Julian Barnes
#54. 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.
P.D. James
#55. Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author's soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted.
Robert Benchley
#56. What distinguishes pulp fiction from great literature is how emphatically the work challenges us to interpret it.
Bruce Meyer
#57. Within a week I walked the streets of Tel-Aviv, I wandered around Budapest and found myself admiring the Architecture of Paris. That's the power of great literature.
Byron Ortiz
#58. Great literature, if we read it well, opens us up to the world and makes us more sensitive to it, as if we acquired eyes that could see through things and ears that could hear smaller sounds.
Donald Hall
#59. The idea behind a dish - the delight and the surprise - makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn't just 'Here's the facts - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.' It's how you tell it.
Nathan Myhrvold
#60. And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature.
Jerry Pournelle
#61. I read anything I saw lying around. Pulp fiction, great literature and everything in between - I gave them all the same rough treatment.
Ian McEwan
#62. Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger.
Michael N. Castle
#63. 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
#64. It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.
Gilbert Murray
#65. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Harold Bloom
#66. Dagwood Bumstead was a great unrecognized hero of American literature. He showed up every day, he got knocked down every day, he never got to eat his sandwich every day, the dog jumped on him every day, his wife was giving him a hard time and he showed up every day.
James L. Brooks
#67. Would you like some more pancakes? Annie asked. I could tell that Annie was a smart girl. I hate to eat on the job. But I must keep up my strength.
Marjorie Weinman Sharmat
#68. 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.
Sarah Orne Jewett
#69. I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory than a success with some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree.
Honore De Balzac
#70. Literary history is the great morgue where all seek the dead ones whom they love, or to whom they are related.
Heinrich Heine
#71. Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.
Edward Dahlberg
#72. I suppose it's true that most great television, literature, and other forms of high art (and basic cable) benefit from a little hindsight. 'M.A.S.H.' comes to mind. So does 'The Iliad.'
Kevin Bleyer
#73. Nor shall this peace sleep with her; but as when
The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
Her ashes new-create another heir
As great in admiration as herself.
William Shakespeare
#74. Pop changes week to week, month to month. But great music is like literature.
Ravi Shankar
#75. It seemed that in Paris you could discuss classic literature or architecture or great music with everyone from the garbage collector to the mayor.
Julia Child
#76. The great work of Gibbon is indispensable to the student of history. The literature of Europe offers no substitute for "The
Edward Gibbon
#77. Much has been made about the death of the novel and the end of literature as it's seen to be assailed by technology, by the web, by the many and varied new forms of entertainment and culture. I don't share that pessimism because I think it is one of the great inventions of the human spirit.
Richard Flanagan
#78. That's the great thing about literature
it makes the world less lonely.
Robert Stone
#79. Well, the thing about great fictional characters from literature, and the reason that they're constantly turned into characters in movies, is that they completely speak to what makes people human.
Keira Knightley
#80. 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
#82. In the same period, Polish literature also underwent some significant changes. From social-political literature, which had a great tradition and strong motivation to be that way, Polish literature changed its focus to a psychological rather than a social one.
Andrzej Wajda
#83. Ariadne made an impression on you, and that's great. But life is not literature. Sooner or later, the spell wears off, the romantic feelings disappear, and you're left watching somebody's body disintegrate. You start with a love story, you end up manacled to an hourglass, watching the sands run out.
Paul Murray
#84. I can hear some of you groaning as you read this section. "Great," you're saying. "I have to put a theme in my book? Themes are only for that 'high literature' stuff that gets taught in universities, not for my nice, entertaining genre fiction.
Libbie Hawker
#85. All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.
Carson McCullers
#86. Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?
Karen Thompson Walker
#87. The reading of great books has been a life-altering activity to me and, for better or worse, brought me singing and language-obsessed to that country where I make my living. Except for teaching, I've had no other ambition in life than to write books that mattered.
Pat Conroy
#88. Read the great books, gentlemen," Mr. Monte said one day. "Just the great ones. Ignore the others. There's not enough time.
Pat Conroy
#89. 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
#90. From our human experience and history, at least as far as I am informed, I know that everything essential and great has only emerged when human beings had a home and were rooted in a tradition. Today's literature is, for instance, largely destructive.
Martin Heidegger
#91. Reading a great work of literature can truly be likened to having a conversation with a great mind.
Jennie Chancey
#92. A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
Ezra Pound
#93. Dickens' London was a place of the mind, but it was also a real place. Much of what we take today to be the marvellous imaginings of a visionary novelist turn out on inspection to be the reportage of a great observer.
Judith Flanders
#94. Time the great destroyer of other men's happiness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its possessor.
Isaac D'Israeli
#95. Were I more conversant with literature and its great names, I could go on quoting them ad infinitum and acknowledge my debt for the merit you have been generous enough to find in my work.
Knut Hamsun
#96. She's the latest freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She's the self-made girl!
( ... )
Well, to begin with, the self-made girl's a new feature. That, however, you know. In the second place she isn't self-made at all. We all help to make her, we take such an interest in her.
Henry James
#97. As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.
William H Gass
#98. 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
#99. Looking back on my life, I sigh. The caprice of youth goes with the wind, I've no regrets.
Roman Payne
