Literature About Literature Quotes

#1. Like many works of literature, Hollywood chooses for its villains people who strive for social dominance through the pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power. But the ordinary business of capitalism is much more egalitarian: It's about finding meaning and enjoyment in work and production.

Alex Tabarrok

#2. He would wordlessly light up his pungent antiasthma cigarettes in the middle of class and debate openly with his mathematics and literature teachers about inaccuracies he's caught them in.

Jon Lee Anderson

#3. 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

#4. You've got to love libraries. You've got to love books. You've got to love poetry. You've got to love everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it.

Ray Bradbury

#5. Photography's about the surface, what's happening at the top of the sea. Literature's about all the stuff below.

Max Pam

#6. In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this - death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

Terry Pratchett

#7. I learned a lot of things about literature talking to people at the publishing company. Did you know that about 90 percent of celebrity autobiographies are ghostwritten?

John Cleese

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. There are a lot of people of my generation in New Zealand literature, young writers on their first or second books, that I'm just really excited about. There seems to be a big gap between the generation above and us; it seems to be quite radically different in terms of form and approach.

Eleanor Catton

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

Paul Di Filippo

#12. I don't know when reading books became the most essential thing about me, but it happened over the years and I found myself the most willing servant of what I considered a rich habit.

Pat Conroy

#13. When I spoke to her in Spanish I was not translating, I was not thinking my thoughts in English first, but I was nevertheless outside the language I was speaking, building simple sentences with the blocks I'd memorized, not communicating through a fluid medium.

Ben Lerner

#14. People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves.

Harold Bloom

#15. You came to talk about the play," he said. "Let me discourage you. It was written to entertain people. Like horror movies. It isn't literature, it doesn't mean anything. Wharfinger was no Shakespeare." "Who was he?" she said. "Who was Shakespeare? It was a long time ago.

Thomas Pynchon

#16. Most influential of all is the philosopher Stanley Cavell, and a younger generation of philosophers who have attempted to follow his pioneering work in thinking about literature philosophically.

Philip Kitcher

#17. 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

#18. Of everything
I have ever endured,

Y
O
U

are
My Favourite Tragedy.

Meraaqi

#19. If you have feelings about reading, you feel the rhythm of prose or of a poem like music. It awakens something in your soul and then of course you study, read, you grow up and you begin to understand the message and that is the first step towards understanding life.

Maria Kodama

#20. 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

#21. To many writers and thinkers, though not to all, another text is, or can be, the most naked and charged of life-forces ... The concept of allusion or analogue is totally inadequate. To Dante these other texts are the organic context of identity. They are as directly about life as life is about them.

George Steiner

#22. 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

#23. Only when I make movements away from the tribe of indie art and literature. Maybe that's something important for me to keep thinking about. What you gain, what you lose, why and how. Maybe the edge of the page is the place for me. Maybe that's OK.

Lidia Yuknavitch

#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. This is the harsh truth about us: not only do Filipinos ignore books, literature - we do not understand how important the arts are - not just to those of us who work at it, but to the nation as a whole.

F. Sionil Jose

#26. I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order
pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature.

Kate Zambreno

#27. 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

#28. As I think about anyone or anything
whether history or literature or my father or political organizations or a poem or a film
as I seek to evaluate the potentiality, the life-supportive commitment and possibilities of anyone or any thing, the decisive question is always where is the love?

June Jordan

#29. There is something very romantic about the orphan figure in American literature.

Christopher Bollen

#30. Literature must always be about gloom of one sort or another, on the principal that there is nothing interesting to be said about happy people.

Theodore Zeldin

#31. Amie frowned. 'That's what I can't figure out. I mean everyone wants their happy ending, right? No one cares about reading actual literature anymore anyway. All they want is vampires and supernatural mumbo-jumbo. It's sick, really.

Jennifer Silverwood

#32. Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them.

Joan Didion

#33. They blossomed, they did not talk about blossoming.

Dejan Stojanovic

#34. When I wrote about Mary Wollstonecraft, I found that here she was, in the late 18th century, going to work for the 'Analytical Review.' What was the 'Analytical Review?' It was a magazine that dealt with politics and literature.

Claire Tomalin

#35. But he'll never be fully recognised, because Scots literature these days is all about complaining and moaning and being injured in one's soul.

Alexander McCall Smith

#36. 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

#37. I would much rather read a book about Ty Cobb, who was quite possibly a sociopath. It makes for more interesting copy. Some of the most memorable characters in literature were villains.

Jonathan Weeks

#38. My mother's father taught English literature. When I was about ten or eleven, I could recite Macaulay's 'Lays of Ancient Rome.' While other kids were playing pedestrian war games, I'd be Horatius keeping the bridge.

Bernie Taupin

#39. I'd be doing it to screw the literary world. Those bastards all huddle in their gloomy cave and kiss each other's asses, and lick each other's wounds, and trip each other up, all the while spewing this pompous crap about the mission of literature.

Haruki Murakami

#40. The herbalist I met a few times - it was great - she gave me literature about the different processes that an herbalist would do to make medicines from certain herbs and things.

Caitriona Balfe

#41. At Harvard I was taking an African-American studies class, and we were reading about the tragic mulatto. Invariably, the tragic mulatto can't fit in either world and flings herself off a bridge. So I'm reading, and I'm like, 'Oh, my God, I think I'm in literature,' but my life was never like that.

Soledad O'Brien

#42. Literature has as one of its principal allures that it tells you something about life that life itself can't tell you. I just thought literature is a thing that human beings do.

Richard Ford

#43. Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo clinic.

Roy Blount Jr.

#44. Chinatown is tremendously interesting ... It's a part of the city that hasn't really been explored in crime literature or in any general literature. It's as though Chinatown didn't exist. People write about New York without mentioning Chinatown at all.

S.J. Rozan

#45. The fact about contemporaries is that they're doing the same thing on another railway line: one resents their distracting one, flashing past, the wrong way- something like that: from timidity, partly, one keeps one's eyes on one's own road.

Virginia Woolf

#46. He couldn't imagine using the word 'rewarding' about a work of art - for instance that such and such a book has given me so much, taught me so much, etc etc. - but thought solely that it enlightened him, made him see, cynically and withough false expectations, so that he felt he was alive.

Dag Solstad

#47. In a way, 'Billy Elliot' was autobiographical. I can't dance, but I think his dancing was me discovering about writing and literature.

Lee Hall

#48. So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with. That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.

Margaret Atwood

#49. There is only one story.

Thomas C. Foster

#50. Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.

F. Sionil Jose

#51. People are more concerned about the economy then these ridiculous concerns as to gender inequity in society, as manifested in marriages, in the mental health system, and then in literature.

Kate Zambreno

#52. There should be a democracy of voices in literature. There are people who live with a kind of striving and with a certain kind of tenderness - it's not an unusual thing - and maybe that's not written about enough.

Anne Michaels

#53. Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

#54. My intention throughout has been to write, to create literature, and to be able to look people in the eye after I'd done it - the people I'd written about.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. I looked into the literature on this," said Nightingale, "and it wasn't very helpful."
"There's a literature about this?"
"You'd be amazed, Constable, about what there's a literature on.

Ben Aaronovitch

#59. My feelings about politics and literature and mathematics and the rest of life's minutiae can only be described through a labyrinthine of six-sided questions, but everything that actually matters can be explained by Lindsey fucking Buckingham and Stevie fucking Nicks in four fucking minutes.

Chuck Klosterman

#60. All literature, or most literature, is about sex. (A. Burgess)

Blanche Bachelar

#61. Only as we give the children the truth about life can we expect any improvement in it.

Mabel Robinson

#62. 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

#63. Writers of literature, if they are real writers, know that their readers are confused about reality and the emotions derived from that reality and are looking for clarity concerning the life that they are engulfed in.

Noah Cicero

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

Robert Stone

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

Audrey Niffenegger

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. And that's the beginning of the primary conversation in African American literature, right there: the African descendant explaining to the European descendant about how white people's actions are affecting the lives of black people.* In

Mat Johnson

#69. Whatever it is that you're feeling, whatever it is you have a question about, whatever it is that you long to know, there is some book, somewhere, with the key. You just have to search for it.

Adriana Trigiani

#70. 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

#71. I didn't make any money from my writing until much later. I published about 80 stories for nothing. I spent on literature.

Naguib Mahfouz

#72. American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos.

Diane Wakoski

#73. Because all of us are so ready to talk about the world we live in. We are ready to have a publishing industry that is of that world.

Mira Jacob

#74. I would ask: Given the nature of free-market capitalism - where the rule is to rise to the top at all costs - is it possible to have a financial industry hero? And by the way, this is not a pop-culture trend we're talking about. There aren't many financial heroes in literature, theater or cinema.

Martin Scorsese

#75. 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

#76. A poet or philosopher should have no fault to find with his age if it only permits him to do his work undisturbed in his own corner; nor with his fate if the corner granted him allows of his following his vocation without having to think about other people.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#77. Well, you sort of get out of the pool room, you get out of the Marine Corps, you get out and read some literature, you become involved with people who also want to know and are ready to share some ideas about literature and thoughts, and it becomes nourished that way.

Harvey Keitel

#78. I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.

Alice Eve

#79. 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

#80. When the critic has said everything in his power about a literary text, he has still said nothing; for the very existence of literature implies that it cannot be replaced by non-literature

Tzvetan Todorov

#81. There is something sinister about putting a leprechaun in a workhouse. The only solid comfort is that he certainly will not work.

G.K. Chesterton

#82. Every thought about death takes a moment of life away.

Dejan Stojanovic

#83. I don't think the soul is immortal, or at least not immortal in individuals, but it may be immortal as an aspect of the human personality because when I talk about what literature nourishes, it would be silly of me or reductionist to say that it nourishes the brain.

Christopher Hitchens

#84. Oh? And what's so stinking about it?.

Anthony Burgess

#85. What do you think of the Wilcoxes? Are they our sort? Are they likely people? Could they appreciate Helen, who is to my mind a very special sort of person? Do they care about Literature and Art? That is most important when you come to think of it. Literature and Art. Most important. How

E. M. Forster

#86. Mesopotamian literature is concerned about the jurisdiction of the various gods in the cosmos with humankind at the bottom of the heap, the Genesis account is interested in the jurisdiction of humankind over the rest of creation as a result of the image of God in which people were created.

John H. Walton

#87. I got my first whiff of what big-time adult literature was all about when I was in 8th grade. I got it from Mark Linn-Baker. You know - the guy from 'Perfect Strangers.'

Lev Grossman

#88. 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

#89. I knew I had to write about Canada. I just could not find in literature any examples of the immigrant experience that I've had.

Shyam Selvadurai

#90. What I had always loved most about literature was the way it eased my own loneliness. Even

Rufi Thorpe

#91. Writers do not write about places, they write about people who happen to live in those places. This is something that the labellers and their labels don't understand either.

Aminatta Forna

#92. 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

#93. I think literature can make familiar the unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar is very much about the dispossessed, and so the value of literature seems to me to go into the stories that not everybody wants to tell.

Colum McCann

#94. For me, fantasy must be about something, otherwise it's foolishness... ultimately it must be about human beings, it must be about the human condition, it must be another look at infinity, it must be another way of seeing the paradox of existence.

George Clayton Johnson

#95. We're surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.

Barbara Kingsolver

#96. 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

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

F. Sionil Jose

#98. Jane Austen would be so proud. Another girl trussed up for a fancy party."
"On the contrary, she'd be horrified. All that skin. You'd need about another five yards of material.

Mary Jane Hathaway

#99. Literature is integrated, and I'm not just talking about color or race. I'm talking about the power of literature to make us recognize - and again and again - the wholeness of the human experience.

Ralph Ellison

#100. 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