Top 100 Literature Is Quotes
#1. The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
Italo Calvino
#2. I think literature is best when it's voicing what we would prefer not to talk about.
Rick Moody
#3. Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.
Mary Oliver
#4. Literature is not a game for the cloistered elect. Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed.
John Steinbeck
#5. Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely, eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms, and little wildflowers.
Roberto Bolano
#6. The crown of literature is poetry. It is the end and aim. It is the sublimest activity od the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty.
W. Somerset Maugham
#7. Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.
Northrop Frye
#8. Literature is the most powerful weapon that can be use to bring the change.
Lalima Yadav
#9. We are all orbits of some sort,
circling around the world we call our own,
and literature...
Literature is a compass;
Thabo Jijana
#10. I have concluded that Literature is no proper pursuit for a gentleman and that Writing ought never to be consider'd but as an elegant Accomplishment to be indulg'd in with infrequency and Discrimination.
H.P. Lovecraft
#11. Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.
Roland Barthes
#13. What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power.
John Cheever
#14. Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song.
G.K. Chesterton
#15. True literature is more than just a story someone has told. It must provide the reader with the essence of the world on a moral, philosophical and emotional level.
Orhan Pamuk
#16. Scarcely anything in literature is worth a damn except what is written between the lines.
Raymond Chandler
#18. Academics always feel that they deserve more. (Roberto Bolano)
Reading and enjoying fine literature is a highly cultivated and refined activity, whereas writing it is everything but so.
(xxx)
Kim Leine
#19. 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
#20. Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.
Andre Breton
#21. Literature is a comprehensive essence of the intellectual life of a nation.
William Shakespeare
#22. Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
Lionel Trilling
#23. To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That's what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.
Susan Sontag
#24. In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.
Northrop Frye
#25. Apparently, faith in life is one thing and faith in literature is another.
Gerald Weaver
#26. The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.
Donald Barthelme
#27. 'Religion,' I should note, has a disputed etymology in Latin: some say it's from 'relegere,' meaning 'to reread', while others say it's from religare, meaning 'to connect' or 'link.' Literature is life's fastener.
Joshua Cohen
#28. It is with fine sentiments that bad literature is made. Descend to the bottom of the well if you wish to see the stars.
Andre Gide
#29. Transmuting this sandy metaphor, if literature is my sandbox, then the real world is my hourglass - an hourglass that drains grain by grain.
Rabih Alameddine
#30. We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.
T. S. Eliot
#31. Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life's the other way round.
David Lodge
#32. Indeed; peace literature is almost exclusively read, though to good effect, by pacifists, while what is needed is the canvassing of those who have not so far been won to the cause.
Fredrik Bajer
#33. The language of literature is the language of all the world. It is necessary to divest ourselves at once of the notion of diversified vocal and grammatical speech which constitutes the various tongues of the Earth, and conceals the identity of image and logic in the minds of all men.
George Edward Woodberry
#35. It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction's fantasies. We often fear that literature is a game we can't afford to play - the product of idleness and immoral ease. In the grip of that feeling it isn't life we pursue, but the point and purpose of life - its facility, its use.
William H Gass
#36. The writer's first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth ... and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification.
Susan Sontag
#38. It seems to me that an author who has determined very new domains in literature is Gertrude Stein.
Raymond Queneau
#39. Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.
Juan Ramon Jimenez
#40. 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
#41. The American's literature is all about being hot and sexy, inspiring a girl and going to bed with her. It focuses on being a hero, saving lives and surviving last, but it has nothing to do with dignity, serenity.
M.F. Moonzajer
#43. Literature is a human apocalypse, man's revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgement of mankind.
Northrop Frye
#44. Literature is a vast ocean, in which one has to drown themselves to be able to conquer it. Those on shore can see a side of it or have tasted a part of it. And I choose to drown myself in it than just to see it.
Nikita Dudani
#45. A knowledge of general literature is one of the evidences of an enlightened mind; and to give an apt quotation at a fitting time, proves that the mind is stored with sentential lore that can always be used to great advantage by its possessor.
James Ellis
#47. That's what literature is. It's the people who went before us, tapping out messages from the past, from beyond the grave, trying to tell us about life and death! Listen to them!
Connie Willis
#48. 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
#49. Literature is my life of course, but from an ontological point of view. From an existential point of view, I like being a teacher.
Antonio Tabucchi
#50. The habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#51. Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.
Thomas McGuane
#52. I am of the opinion that I am not a political writer, and, moreover, that as far as true literature is concerned, there actually are no political writers. I think that my writing is no more political than ancient Greek theatre. I would have become the writer I am in any political regime.
Ismail Kadare
#53. Modern literature is a north-east wind
a blight of the human soul. I take credit to myself for having helped to make it so. The way to produce fine fruit is to blight the flower. You call this a paradox. Marry, so be it.
Thomas Love Peacock
#54. In general, literature is a natural adversary of totalitarianism. Tyrannical governments all view literature in the same way: as their enemy. I lived for a long time in a totalitarian state, and I know firsthand that horror.
Ismail Kadare
#55. Children's literature is one of my joys, and it's also my mental comfort food.
Gretchen Rubin
#56. I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time.
Rabih Alameddine
#57. While in some countries there's a feeling that literature must stay away from religion, this is not so in India - in the Indian way, literature is just another means to find a more spiritual life, to find our way to God.
Amish Tripathi
#58. All literature is written by the old to teach the young how to express themselves so that they in turn may write literature to teach the old how to express themselves. All literature is written by mentally precocious adolescents and by mentally precocious senescents.
Laura Riding
#59. Literature is a mystical place for me. It's not dry. It's where miracles happen.
John Darnielle
#60. It just fascinates me, those private mechanisms that we use to make sense of the world - whether they have to do with the five senses or not. I think literature is one of the only kinds of art that truly lets us into that.
Leni Zumas
#61. Literature is language charged with meaning
Ezra Pound
#62. The test of real literature is that it will bear repetition. We read over the same pages again and again, and always with fresh delight.
Samuel McChord Crothers
#63. 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
#64. Good literature is a lifeboat! Every time you feel you are sinking, jump on it!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#65. literature is a fiction that tells a deeper truth,
Adam Johnson
#66. The principle of literature is devotion to the particulars of life.
Carol Bly
#67. Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.
Jorge Luis Borges
#69. My job is to get people to write something truthful, something about truth and beauty - wherever they are - and to understand how literature is made. And then if they become great writers, that's great, and probably has nothing to do with me.
Grace Paley
#70. Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.
Robert Graves
#71. Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.
Nelson Algren
#73. The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.
George Orwell
#74. It's one thing if everyone wears the same shoes or drinks the same soda. But the world of literature is the last place in which globalization should mean homogeneity.
Benjamin Moser
#75. 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
#76. To tell the truth, my dear count, I must own that of all nauseating human emanations, literature is one of those which disgust me most. I can see nothing in it but compromise and flattery. And I go so far as to doubt whether it can be anything else.
Andre Gide
#77. Reality is not an inspiration for literature. At its best, literature is an inspiration for reality.
Romain Gary
#79. That's why literature is so fascinating. It's always up for interpretation, and could be a hundred different things to a hundred different people. It's never the same thing twice.
Sara Raasch
#80. I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in which it might have fallen silent, how to attack its own virtue, and how to fall in love with its own dissolution and court its own end.
Jorge Luis Borges
#81. A good story, just like a good sentence, does more than one job at once. That's what literature is: a story that does more than tell a story, a story that manages to reflect in some way the multilayered texture of life itself.
Karen Thompson Walker
#82. No work of literature is the product of only one or two conscious ideas. A story is mysteriously dense of meaning.
Carol Bly
#83. 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
#84. Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score.
Kurt Vonnegut
#85. Literature is one of the most interesting and significant expressions of humanity.
P.T. Barnum
#86. For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.
Anne Fadiman
#87. Literature is always something - it is either story or poetry, ideally both. That is, you always know what it is and even if the interpretation is not available, the experience of language is.
Aleksandar Hemon
#89. Literature is art and art is about passion. It's about drive. It's about beauty. How can you slide through a semester of that and not be moved by it?
Kristen Ashley
#90. Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.
Roland Barthes
#91. If the future, as imagined in literature, is really the present taken to extremes, then the past is also the present, but boiled down.
Walter Kirn
#92. Literature got me into this mess and literature is going to have to get me out of it.
Philip Roth
#93. Life without literature is a life reduced to penury.
M.H. Abrams
#94. History is in charge of putting things in order and society is in charge of defining them. The more order we achieve, the more truth is hidden behind that neat surface... Perhaps literature is about throwing into disarray what has been defined... About making a mess of things, all over again.
Kyung-Sook Shin
#95. Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other
Anton Chekhov
#96. 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
#97. Why should Cornishmen learn Cornish? There is no money in it, it serves no practical purpose, and the literature is scanty and of no great originality or value. The question is a fair one, the answer is simple. Because they are Cornish.
Henry Jenner
#98. People are lucky because they have shelters, they have refuges, they have sanctuaries and they have heavens! And what are they? Nature is a refuge; music is a shelter; literature is a sanctuary and art is a heaven! Whenever you need them you can take refuge in them!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#99. Good literature is one key to peace. When we stop reading each other, when we stop paying attention to each other's words and stories, we too easily oppose one another.
Dave DiGrazie
#100. I just can't get with this idea that literature is a 12-step program. If someone wants to read a book to see good people get rewarded and the bad people get punished, essentially what they want is a fairy tale.
China Mieville
