Top 100 Quotes About Literature
#1. I saw within Its depth how It conceives
All things in a single volume bound by Love
of which the universe is the scattered leaves.
Dante Alighieri
#2. The Cubist paintings in the Centre Pompidou in Paris were strange but amazing. The big fat magical cat said they made her eyes hurt.
Jim Shanahan
#3. I have spent my spare time studying literature popular with young women of this planet. One should always study the battlefield."
Sean glanced at him. "And?"
"I suggest you give up now. According to my research, in a vampire-werewolf love triangle, the vampire always gets the girl.
Ilona Andrews
#4. Scholarly acumen sharpens taste and judgment, but we must never mistake criticism for art. Intellectual analysis, however heady, will not nourish the soul.
Robert McKee
#6. 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
#8. My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads.
Charles Baxter
#10. 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
#11. The press is the exclusive literature of the million; to them it is literature, church, and college.
Wendell Phillips
#12. The topography of literature, the fact in fiction,is one of my pleasures
I mean, where the living road enters the pages of a book, and you are able to stroll along both the real and imagined road.
Paul Theroux
#13. 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
#14. If critics of 'readable fiction' want literature to change the ways people dream, they need first to come down from the mountain and speak to the people.
Graham Joyce
#15. He tries to find the exit from himself but there is no door.
Dejan Stojanovic
#16. Hell, everybody is a masochist. Some of us are just a little more private.
Cecil Brown
#17. 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
#18. By the time we were knit in our mothers' wombs, our lives were like open books before Him
every sentence read, every paragraph indented, every chapter titled, every page numbered. He knew it all in advance
all the sin, all the selfishness, every weakness. Yet He chose to love us
lavishly.
Beth Moore
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. Molly Bloom is simply the most sensuous woman in literature.
Sara Sheridan
#23. 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
#24. The uncanny is not a literary genre. But nor is it a non-literary genre. It overflows the very institution of literature. It inhabits, haunts, parasitizes the allegedly non-literary. It makes 'genre' blink.
Nicholas Royle
#25. The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.
Malcolm X
#27. If your mind is loaded with many burdens, you will not feel yourself empty even in an empty place!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#28. Today's literature: prescriptions written by patients.
Karl Kraus
#29. Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.
Harold Bloom
#30. I nearly fell asleep over Dickens in English. Mind you, he's snoozeworthy at the best of times.
Jo Walton
#31. It is the second job of literature to create myth. But its first job is to destroy it.
Kenzaburo Oe
#32. 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
#33. Censors are necessary, increasingly necessary, if America is to avoid having a vital literature.
Don Marquis
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. For someone who made such an enormous contribution to American literature, Mark Twain has been the subject of many books but few major biographies.
Michael Patrick Hearn
#38. Crammed among the stacks of books in his room, the author treated literature as if each book were a window in a city of unstable skyscrapers, and he was the window-washer tasked with the impossible job of cleaning them all. - From "Pageturner" in 365 Tomorrows
Joseph Patrick Pascale
#39. 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
#40. Although by 1851 tales of adventure had begun to seem antiquated, they had rendered a large service to the course of literature: they had removed the stigma, for the most part, from the word novel.
Carl Clinton Van Doren
#42. Serious affairs and history are carefully laid snares for the uninformed.
Dejan Stojanovic
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. It is not my intention to explain Turkey, its culture and its problems. My literature has a universal concern: I want to bring people and their emotions closer to my readers, not explain Turkish politics.
Orhan Pamuk
#46. 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
#47. 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
#49. When I was a worker I busied myself with socialist or, if you like, marxist literature.
Adolf Hitler
#50. 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
#51. If you hurt her any more than you already have, the wound could be too deep to fix.
Haruki Murakami
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.
Gustave Flaubert
#55. Actors are the jockeys of literature. Others supply the horses, the plays, and we simply make them run.
Ralph Richardson
#57. Philosophy says truth, literature shows truth.
Peter Kreeft
#58. Horror. I can't manage it. I become
well
horrified. Self-help books have a similar effect.
When asked, "Any literary genre you simply can't be bothered with?" - (By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from the NYT Book Review, by Pamela Paul)
Emma Thompson
#59. 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
#60. And I found both literature and the church very dramatic presences in the world of the 1950s.
Thomas Keneally
#61. Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing. It is as if there were a curse on money: every writer writes badly as soon as he starts writing for gain.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#62. American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos.
Diane Wakoski
#64. Homer and Shakespeare and Milton and Marvell and Wordsworth are but the rustling of leaves and crackling of twigs in the forest, and there is not yet the sound of any bird. The Muse has never lifted up her voice to sing.
Henry David Thoreau
#65. We must protect the minority writers because they are the research workers of literature. They keep it alive. It has been fashionable of late to seek out and force such writers into more popular channels, to the detriment of both writer and an unprepared public.
Anais Nin
#66. 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
#67. Yes, I am confusing literature with life. I'm declaring my own ordinary life to be a work of literature.
Tadeusz Konwicki
#68. 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
#69. A letter Lewis wrote reveals an 18-year-old with the energy of a schoolboy and the tastes of an octogenarian.
Philip Zaleski
#70. 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
#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. I had an older brother who was very interested in literature, so I had an early exposure to literature, and and theater. My father sometimes would work in musical comedies.
Francis Ford Coppola
#73. When I was young, when I started to write, we were totally convinced that literature was a kind of weapon.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#74. From a really young age, I was reading like a writer. I was reading for the deep understanding of the literature; not simply to hear the story but to understand how the author got the story on the page.
Jacqueline Woodson
#75. 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
#76. There is no book so bad it does not contain something good.
Pliny
#77. Only philosophy can go deep enough to show that literature goes still deeper than philosophy
Michel Serres
#79. I can only speak for myself. But what I write and how I write is done in order to save my own life. And I mean that literally. For me literature is a way of knowing that I am not hallucinating, that whatever I feel/know is.
Barbara Christian
#81. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Harold Bloom
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. Everything I love: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression.
Christopher Hitchens
#85. It was like hiking into a Hemingway story; everything was sepia-toned and bristling with subtext.
Leslie What
#86. 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
#87. Maud Gonne was - excuse me, Maud Gonne was central to the Gaelic literature revival. She wrote plays, and she sang.
Derrick Jensen
#88. You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilisation to pieces, turn the world upside down and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of literature.
Mahatma Gandhi
#89. Now we're guests in a faraway land nearly 40 years on.
No trees, no cool breeze,
no best friends.
Only endless days spent in sending SMSs...
Nabeel Philip Mohan
#90. Fantasy is the oldest form of literature and science fiction is just a new twist on it.
Katharine Kerr
#91. 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
#92. There are countless circles of hell; believers never penetrate the ninth circle.
Dejan Stojanovic
#93. The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.
Charles Simic
#94. The more we get away from believing and studying literature, the worst we become, the more we lose our soul.
Shane Warren Jones
#95. Once
God wrote a story
that shook the heaven to the very core.
Love was the only language used;
You and I
were the only characters.
Subhan Zein
#96. Sigmund Freud was a half baked Viennese quack. Our literature, culture, and the films of Woody Allen would be better today if Freud had never written a word.
Ian Shoales
#97. I give pleasure to you. Do not interfere..." #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion
Olga Goa
#98. I don't want my writing to be work to read. My main goal is completely shameless entertainment. I want people to smile and giggle and enjoy the book. I'm not trying to save the world through literature.
Gail Carriger
#99. Through helping one another, you can often eliminate the prefix 'im' from the word impossible!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#100. 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
