Top 100 Literature That Quotes
#1. I would say if you are familiar with our history and the history of our art and literature that you see a clear cut pattern of people wanting to contribute, not only artistically, but in some practical purpose, for the benefits of the community.
Gil Scott-Heron
#2. Luckily, what you trade off in not being part of the comic book canon and not having some literature that you can use to your benefit, in terms of figuring out who you are, you gain in the ability to just be whoever you want to be.
Dallas Roberts
#3. 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
#4. How any person decides to emphasize strengths and mitigate weaknesses is something people have to figure out for themselves. I'm wary of the self-help literature that suggests there are certain rules. I'm very happy for people to look at my story and say it's possible to achieve many things.
Daniel Tammet
#5. One: I am proud to say that my vampires do not sparkle.
Two: I feel like in literature that we've gone [this way] towards the kissing vampires side of the needle. I think it's time we go back towards the killing vampires side of the needle.
Seth Grahame-Smith
#6. It is just the literature that we read for 'amusement' or 'purely for pleasure' that may have the greatest, least suspected, earliest influence on us.
T. S. Eliot
#7. It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.
Anatole Broyard
#8. The French have a different take on photography than Americans do. They consider photography to be absolutely parallel to literature. That often makes for a deeper perception of the work.
Ralph Gibson
#9. Love is full of pain and mistakes. That's what makes it interesting and that's why we explore relationships in literature. That whole 'love is never having to say you're sorry' crap is just that, crap. Love is learning how to say you're sorry.
Richard Paul Evans
#10. When I went through the break-up, I really looked for some kind of music, or art or literature that could say, "I've been in the same situation." I couldn't find anything at the moment, and that made me really sad.
Jens Lekman
#11. You're not getting the joy out of literature that it gave you. This is the danger of what we do. Look at Hemingway and so many others. You devote your life to one thing, that is what you are. It's artificial but it's all you have. If you lose it, then you're nothing and there's no point in going on.
T.C. Boyle
#12. 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
#13. Over the years, I began to understand that there were a lot of people out there reading physics in popular literature that they could not understand - not because it was too advanced, but because it wasn't advanced enough.
Leonard Susskind
#14. Life is seen as an ongoing war between art and philistinism - and although the philistines may win some of the battles, it is literature that always wins the war.
Helon Habila
#15. An aphorism is a synthesis of poetry and prose, it is a narrative precipitate, a didactic parable, an ideological concept, in practice it 's compressed and zipped philosophy . It is literature that adapts itself to the digital age.
William C. Brown
#16. The day is past when schools could afford to give sufficient time and attention to the teaching of the ancient languages to enable the student to get that enjoyment out of classical literature that made the lives of our grandfathers so rich.
James Loeb
#17. I became a feminist activist propelled in part by outrage and despair, and a stubborn determination to shape a life, and create a literature, that was not a lie.
Dorothy Allison
#18. Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society ... loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#19. My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour and twenty-five-thousand mental institutions.
Allen Ginsberg
#20. I think that the idea that there's such a thing as a national literature that's somehow uniquely expressive of a national soul or culture or mentality is probably also something that nobody really believes in anymore.
Louis Menand
#21. Well, the oil, the oil spot, if you will, is a, is a term in counterinsurgency literature that connotes a peaceful area, secure area. So what you're trying to do is to always extend that, to push that out.
David Petraeus
#22. Magic realism - somebody used that phrase the other day that is familiar with South American literature. That rang a bell. It resonates with me.
Sam Neill
#23. Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.
F. Sionil Jose
#24. The genre has moved into this commercial aspect of itself, and ignored this extraordinarily rich literature that's filed everywhere else except under travel.
Robyn Davidson
#25. Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review.
William Kennedy
#26. I still maintain that the times get precisely the literature that they deserve, and that if the writing of this period is gloomy the gloom is not so much inherent in the literature as in the times.
Bill Styron
#27. I wanted to write literature that pushed people into their lives rather than helping people escape from them.
Harvey Pekar
#28. There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
Thomas Carlyle
#29. It's literature that provides solace to hearts wounded by man made divisions of religion, race, class, gender and class...
Neelam Saxena Chandra
#30. This, indeed, is one of the eternal paradoxes of both life and literature-that without passion little gets done; yet, without control of that passion, its effects are largely ill or null.
F.L. Lucas
#31. It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#33. It strikes everyone in beginning to form an acquaintance with the treasures of Indian literature that a land so rich in intellectual products and those of the profoundest order of thought.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#34. As a quick aside, phantoms of the living are not unheard of. There are plenty of documented cases in the paranormal case literature that detail apparitions of people who are not actually dead. But they rarely appear within sight of the physical person themselves, and certainly not at the same time.
Richard Estep
#35. There's no need to get rid of literally hundreds of thousands of books that are fine simply because you have a problem with an isolated book or piece of literature that presents extremism.
Mark Earley
#36. The Alice books belong to a branch of literature that speaks deeply and clearly to the human psyche--stories of the journey.
Stephanie Lovett Stoffel
#37. When I look back at what I've written and try to explain it, it doesn't help, but it helps to be in a process of writing. It's the same thing with reading - you lose yourself when you read as well. When I was younger I used literature that way, it was just escapism, a tool to run away from things.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#38. Happily-ever-after monogamy has been reinforced so steadily in literature that we tend to feel like failures when we don't achieve that in reality.
Colleen Chen
#39. It is the life in literature that acts upon life.
J.G. Holland
#40. I am not a Ph.D. in economics or a doctorate in literature that I can afford to take my singing lightly. Even if I sing a jingle, I take it as seriously as oxygen.
Kailash Kher
#41. A short story padded. A species of composition bearing the same relation to literature that the panorama bears to art. As it is too long to be read at a sitting the impressions made by its successive parts are successively effaced, as in the pa
Ambrose Bierce
#42. It seems to me as I reviewed the literature that, with few exceptions, the more confident were the prescriptions about how to behave with ethics and integrity, the further removed was the author from the life and work of the everyday manager.
Steve Kerr
#43. Modern science fiction is the only form of literature that consistently considers the nature of the changes that face us.
Isaac Asimov
#44. Nonfiction is a form of literature that lies halfway between fiction and fact.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#45. Since then the romances of chivalry had been superseded by the flowering of literature that we know as the Spanish Golden Age, and by Cervantes's time nobody considered them to be a threat any more.
Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
#46. 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
#47. Popular fiction's a strong and viable force in literature. That's why it's popular.
Nora Roberts
#48. There are significant moments in everyone's day that can make literature. That's what you ought to write about.
Raymond Carver
#49. Contemporary writers annoyed him, he found their worlds insular, their style too self-conscious and ironic. Theirs was not a literature that belonged to him.
Christos Tsiolkas
#50. It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.
Alfred North Whitehead
#51. It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.
Gao Xingjian
#52. Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward. And so it was literature that brought.
Paul Kalanithi
#54. An action movie should, like any other, follow the narrative traditions of literature. That means there should be subtlety, a slow build and a gradual bringing together of all the separate threads of the plot. To see all of it coming together slowly is very rewarding for the audience.
Shane Black
#55. It's quite clear : an outsider can, on principle, only value foreign literature that translates well; the truly great artists of language and the fecund experimenters are inaccessible to him; are usually unknown to him in fact !
Arno Schmidt
#56. The Bible is not just one book, but an entire library, with stories, songs, poetry, letters and history, as well as literature that might more obviously qualify as 'religious.'
John Drane
#57. The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery.
Chinua Achebe
#58. The boys learn the Quran by heart, rocking back and forth as they recite. They learn that there is no such thing as science or literature, that dinosaurs never existed and man never went to the moon.
Malala Yousafzai
#59. Life is rather above the measure of us all (save for a very few perhaps). We all need literature that is above our measure
though we may not have sufficient energy for it all the time.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#60. You don't find the concept of illicit love at all engaging?"
"The concept, maybe. But in literature? That's like ordering a glass of tap water at a bar.
Nenia Campbell
#61. My world is about stories that entertain; emotions that move; people you'll remember; literature that matters.
M.G. Crisci
#62. So long as there is gold underneath, who cares about the dust on top? Literature! That old whore! We must try to dose her with mercury and pills and clean her out from top to bottom, she has been so ultra-screwed by filthy pricks!
Gustave Flaubert
#63. If we are inspired only by literature that reflects our own interests, all reading becomes a form of narcissism.
Terry Eagleton
#64. Personally I don't trust literature that soothes people's consciences.
Antonio Tabucchi
#65. I like literature that you respond to in some way. You laugh, you cry, you turn the light on - that's great, it's eliciting a response by proxy.
Joanne Harris
#66. I feel that good fantasy will always be in demand. I think children especially need literature that helps them escape from the real world, which is very scary to them right now.
R.L. Stine
#67. I've read books in school that were written by ideological rote - they were brainwashers. Therefore, any art, any literature, that has a clearly defined political goal is repellent to me.
Aleksandar Hemon
#68. You can't eat [literature], that's the problem," he said. "I've tried, it's very dry, and not at all nutritious.
Kenneth Oppel
#69. Science fiction is a unique literature. Science fiction is the first literature that says, 'Tomorrow is going to be different than yesterday, it's going to be a lot different.'
David Gerrold
#70. All the books have it ... That time when you don't know where you'll be, but you can't stay as you are. In life or in literature, that time rarely feels good.
Katherine Reay
#71. 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
#72. Literature makes history come to life. It is maybe the most accurate depiction of history, especially literature that was written in the time period depicted in the story.
Amy Harmon
#73. I have a very ecumenical faith. I have a very inclusive faith. There's a quote I love from recovery literature that says, "The realm of the spirit is roomy and broad. It is open to all." I've absolutely staked my life on that.
Ashley Judd
#74. The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.
Vaclav Havel
#75. Because it's my first language, all the literature that I've read and all the things that I've been inspired by that have been written in Welsh have moved me beyond anything that I've experienced in any other language.
Gwenno
#76. Literature that keeps employing new linguistic and formal modes of expression to draft a panorama of society as a whole while at the same time exposing it, tearing the masks from its face - for me that would be deserving of an award.
Elfriede Jelinek
#77. 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
#78. Religion [...] may be seen as literature that has succeeded beyond any writer's wildest dreams.
Jack Miles
#80. I did have a love for literature that overpowered my hatred of the people who taught it, and I think because I had no respect for the teachers, their attitude didn't poison the writing that I was discovering for myself.
Craig Ferguson
#81. She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being.
Charles Frazier
#82. 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
#83. Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.
Julian Barnes
#84. There isn't a lot of poverty literature in the young-adult world. And I don't know why that is, but I think certainly I felt a gap.
Sherman Alexie
#85. No, Ben. What I'm asking is: Are you the vehicle, and Georgie rides around in you? That is why Ben's the driver, right?
Jonathan Harnisch
#86. Christian literature makes reference to many episodes that parallel the experiences of those going a yogic way. Saint Anthony, one of the first desert mystics, frequently encountered strange and sometimes terrifying psychophysical forces while at prayer.
Willigis Jager
#87. The greatness of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.
T. S. Eliot
#88. 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
#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. People think I'm selling feminism in my books, but what I'm really doing is writing advertising copy for expensive private colleges that most women can't afford anyway. Oh, and try to find a job with a major in English literature. No luck? Joke's on you, sucker!
Mary Gordon
#91. 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
#92. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure.
Don DeLillo
#93. I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades, and that it has no real value
certainly no large value.
Mark Twain
#94. Given that the label "immigrant literature" is already established, unavoidable for anyone with a migrant background and used in any given context, I strongly advocate an absurd amount of specification to go along with the label.
Sasa Stanisic
#95. The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.
Gustave Flaubert
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. I think the truth is that finding ourselves brings more excitement and well-being than anything romance has to offer, and somewhere we know that.
Bell Hooks
#99. Trout might have said, and it can be said of me as well, that he created caricatures rather than characters. His animus against so-called mainstream literature, moreover, wasn't peculiar to him. It was generic among writers of science fiction.
Kurt Vonnegut
#100. When I was young, when I started to write, we were totally convinced that literature was a kind of weapon.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
