Literature's Quotes

#1. That is its sole law: everything has to submit to form. If any of literature's other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these take control over form, the result is poor. That is why writers with a strong style often write poor books.

Karl Ove Knausgard

#2. Spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature's joke, and therefore literature's. True prudence limits this sensualism by admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Max Pam

#4. Literature, for example, serves a pragmatic purpose. Like any form of Art, literature's mission is to make the fulfillment of our essential duties more bearable.

Muriel Barbery

#5. This is my last communique from the planet of the monsters. Never again will I immerse myself in literature's bottomless cesspools. I will go back to writing my poems, such as they are, find a job to keep body and soul together, and make no attempt to be published.

Roberto Bolano

#6. I do think that part of literature's job is to comment on and participate in the social issues of the time.

Linda Sue Park

#7. If England has any dignity left in the way of literature, she will forget for ever the pitiful antics of English Literature's performing flea.

Sean O'Casey

#8. As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.

H.L. Mencken

#9. I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature's ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms.

Ben Lerner

#10. I am drawn mostly, insistently to the human voice. How powerful and necessary the solo voice, the experience of being someone, something else for a little while. This is and will remain literature's killer app, the thing most impervious to threat by everything that's not the word.

Ander Monson

#11. Welcome to Wonderland! Here you will meet some of literature's most

Lewis Carroll

#12. To a lot of us, literature's eternal significance had seemed beyond arguing - like, say, the illegality of government-sponsored torture.

Darin Strauss

#13. What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of 'The Naked and the Dead' and American literature's leading heavyweight contender, to Dan Wolf, the delphic editor of 'The Village Voice.'

James Wolcott

#14. Some days I tell myself that my mission is to say something about the art and sometimes the bliss of limitation. And the legibility of landscape. Other days are more dismal. As if I were queueing in the rain outside confessional literature's nudist colony, mirrors everywhere, blue with cold.

Fredrik Sjoberg

#15. Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature's profligate generosity.

Pat Conroy

#16. Aphorisms are literature's hand luggage. Light and compact, they fit easily into the overhead compartment of your brain.

James Geary

#17. in his view, literature's worth lies in its power of mystification, in mystification it has its truth; therefore a fake, as the mystification of a mystification, is tantamount to a truth squared. He

Italo Calvino

#18. Literature's father figures can only loom, intimidate, and inspire for so long before they must be slain by their offspring.

Larry McCaffery

#19. Literature's view of human nature encouraged understanding, sympathy, and identification with people not like oneself, but the world was pushing everyone in the opposite direction, toward narrowness,

Salman Rushdie

#20. I haven't the stature to critique one of our literature's great novels, Tobias; and I'm not one of those who believe The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn needs critiquing for literary or social reasons.

Norman Lock

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. Today's literature: prescriptions written by patients.

Karl Kraus

#24. I nearly fell asleep over Dickens in English. Mind you, he's snoozeworthy at the best of times.

Jo Walton

#25. 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

#26. The Grimm collections were never intended for children. Not because kids were excluded, but because the division we make today of children's literature didn't exist then. The idea of protecting children from tales with violence didn't occur until the earlier part of the 19th century.

Jack Zipes

#27. 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

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

Diane Wakoski

#29. 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

#30. Any man's life can be seen as a series of engagements with his fathers, Including the surrogates provided by life and literature.

Richard Brookhiser

#31. It's not what you lift, it's where you carry it.

David Foster Wallace

#32. If you read the literature of Soviet Communism, you see a dogma that's chilling. On the other hand, if you read the literature of anti-communism, it's every bit as dogmatic.

Bill Ayers

#33. There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Mao Zedong

#34. The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.

Charles Simic

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. If you ever meet someone who thinks they are so special, the best thing to do is smile. You don't have to say anything. Be friendly and then go do
your best. That will make you special, too!

Jeff Hutchins

#38. (Emerson's) aphorisms tend to be chicken soup for the academic soul or gobledygook of a man who prefers the sounds of words to their meanings.

Micah Mattix

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

Audrey Niffenegger

#40. I founded a club, which is called the Brutally Early Club. It's basically a breakfast salon for the 21st century where art meets science meets architecture meets literature.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

#41. There is no such thing as children's literature.

N. V. M. Gonzalez

#42. From the shelf. Ben's stomach churned as he pulled out Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham. Kenzie would enjoy them, but had Marianna ever read those books before? Not that Dr. Seuss was literature. What

Tricia Goyer

#43. My dad's side of the family had lots of artists and musicians. There's an emotional, quite sentimental quality to Slavic culture. It's very open, it loves art, it loves music, it loves literature. It's very warm, it's very up, it's very down. I would celebrate that.

Nick Clegg

#44. 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

#45. You know, I don't think your brother dislikes you as much as you think. After all, he gave up a kingdom to stay with his family.

C.J. Milbrandt

#46. And if literature is not the Bride and Bedfellow of Truth, what is she? 'Confound it all.' he cried, 'why say Bedfellow when one's already said Bride? Why not simply say what one means and save it?

Virginia Woolf

#47. 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

#48. Woman is deprived of rights from lack of education, and the lack of education results from the absence of rights. We must not forget that the subjection of women is so complete, and dates from such ages back that we are often unwilling to recognise the gulf that separates them from us.

Leo Tolstoy

#49. Mark Twain was an artist working at the highest level. He wrote a book, his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that put America on the world stage for literature. It's almost as if, if you start reading that book as a racist, you cannot finish it and still be a racist.

Val Kilmer

#50. 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

#51. In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.

Aleksandar Hemon

#52. Comics are just another medium to express yourself. It's not cinema; it's not literature; it's just something else. It has a specific requirement, which is that images are used to tell the story. There are lots of crappy movies, with guns and action and Arnold Schwarzenegger or whatever.

Marjane Satrapi

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books.

A.S. Byatt

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. Is literature more important than hurting people? You can't argue that. You can't say it. It's impossible.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

#60. 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

#61. 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

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

Robert Stone

#63. My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist will blow away your expectation of what late-model literature has to be. Unified by obsessions too eerie not to be real, this gorgeous rearrangement of our century's mental furniture is testimony to a new talent of Burroughs/Coover/Acker scale.

David Foster Wallace

#64. When my words are concealed
With lies and disguises, truth and beyond
Insecurities in the veil of trust
Betrayal in bounds of lies
It's just the charm of words darling
Giving the illusion of happiness inside misery

Irum Zahra

#65. Dead parents are gruesome, yes, but anyone who's anyone in children's literature has either been orphaned or abandoned; well-adjusted kids from stable two-parent homes don't go on hero quests.

Lynn Messina

#66. The only people who have trouble with poetry are the people who link it with literature. It's much more akin to mountain-walking, and dancing by yourself at 2 A.M.

Theo Dorgan

#67. A particular ikon an aid to devotion may be itself a word of art, but that is logically accidental; its artistic merits will not make it a better ... ikon. They may make it a worse one.

C.S. Lewis

#68. They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction.
'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all.

John Gardner

#69. Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures

Susan Sontag

#70. When I first stepped into literature twenty-five years ago, I wanted to work on behalf of the oppressed, the working masses, and it seemed to me, mistakenly, that I would not find them among the Jews.

S. Ansky

#71. Marriage cannot be a job as it has become.

Germaine Greer

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world," I said, "but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld *hope* their own world to be - it isn't a mirror, it's an aspiration.

Jasper Fforde

#75. I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time - and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come.

John Green

#76. The only authentic literature of the modern era is the owner's manual.

David Cronenberg

#77. Poetry is not a mere expression of a poet's self, but an enchantment, a spell of the muse, the inspiration. Poetry is thus magic and magic is poetry.

Shilpa Sandesh

#78. It pains me to admit this, but Roger was a good sight less stupid than most children.

Heidi Schulz

#79. A woman can be an object if that's her objective.

Brandon Tietz

#80. 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

#81. Today was a rainy, dreary, wear-your-steel-toed-mud-shoes Wednesday.

Greg Pincus

#82. To see a priest making his meditation before Mass does more for an altar boy's vocation than a thousand pieces of inspirational literature.

Fulton J. Sheen

#83. We really are living in the era that all this sci-fi literature and cinema was centered around, but it's not anything like what we envisioned it to be. It's almost like there's too much choice.

Alan Palomo

#84. 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

#85. Ever'body's askin' that. "What we comin' to?" Seems to me we don't never come to nothin'. Always on the way.

John Steinbeck

#86. Frieda, you despise English music. You know you do. And English art. And English literature, except Shakespeare, and he's a German.

E. M. Forster

#87. That's the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public. We used to go to church to confess our worst behaviour, to be heard and forgiven, then to be redeemed and accepted back into our community
Chuck Palahniuk in interview with TMO

Chuck Palahniuk

#88. Pull a thread here and you'll find it's attached to the rest of the world.

Nadeem Aslam

#89. She had a grocer's faith in books; they can be handed out like Green Stamps and were redeemable for a variety of useful gifts.

Pat Conroy

#90. The businessman who is a novelist is able to drop in on literature and feel no suicidal loss of esteem if the lady is not at home, and he can spend his life preparing without fuss for the awful interview.

V.S. Pritchett

#91. Despite your best efforts, you could not invent a better police force for literature than criticism and the author's own conscience.

Anton Chekhov

#92. 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

#93. It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author's experience worked out literally.

Gore Vidal

#94. It is my sincere hope that Christopher Bryson's apparently thorough and comprehensive perusal of the scientific literature on the biological actions of fluoride and the ensuing debates through the years will receive the attention it deserves and that its implications will be seriously considered.

Arvid Carlsson

#95. No man is offended by another man's admiration of the woman he loves; it is the woman only who can make it a torment.

Jane Austen

#96. Say, you told me you thought Les Miserables was the greatest novel ever written. I think Vanity Fair is the greatest. Let's fight. - Joe Willard

Maud Hart Lovelace

#97. Reading is for pleasure; it's not another form of social competition. Leave those literary Joneses to it.

Heather Reyes

#98. 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

#99. It's a sort of patronizing idea that literature for children has to feature role models of exemplary behavior. I think not only is that bogus, but it leads to really boring books.

Mac Barnett

#100. It's easier to get your high school diploma, become a police inspector, or get your master's degree in literature than to commit suicide. The success rate is less than eight percent.

Martin Page