Top 100 Quotes About Literature
#1. I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art.
Anne Stevenson
#2. I always loved science. And in fact, I got a science award in high school. I mean, I loved science, but I think I loved literature more.
Rita Dove
#3. At a very young age, I was influenced enormously by Julio Cortazar or Carlos Fuentes. In that literature, there's always an exploration of different perspectives, points of view.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
#4. Enjoyment of literature is achieved only by reading without expectation but with anticipation.
David McDonald
#5. The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
Alan Bennett
#6. I am not ashamed to admit that I belong to those who fantasize that literature is capable of bringing new horizons and new perspectives
philosophical, religious, aesthetical and even social.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#7. I gradually became persuaded that the subjects, without intending to, had revealed to me a basic truth about markets that was foreign to the literature of economics.
Vernon L. Smith
#8. Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone.
Joseph Joubert
#9. When a man can observe himself suffering and is able, later, to describe what he's gone through, it means he was born for literature.
Edouard Bourdet
#10. The world of fiction is a sovereign world that comes to life in the author's head and follows the rules of art, of literature. And that is the major difference that is reflected in the form of the work, in its language and its plot. An author invents every aspect of a fiction, every detail.
Imre Kertesz
#11. The literature of America should reflect the children of America.
Lucille Clifton
#12. I read anything I saw lying around. Pulp fiction, great literature and everything in between - I gave them all the same rough treatment.
Ian McEwan
#13. The pretentiousness of literature really annoys me; the way a writer is held as this sort of magical person to be revered on the stage. Everything I do on tour is to try and destroy that pretense.
Chuck Palahniuk
#14. The high arts of literature and music stand in a curious relationship to one another, at once securely comfortable and deeply uneasy - rather like a long-term marriage.
Will Self
#16. That helped me to keep in touch with myself and to keep in touch with this really quite extraordinary language and literature into which I had pushed a little way.
Robert Fitzgerald
#17. ... the primary trait of young adult literature is that the author's emphasis is on plot and character and not on his own brilliance. And because few people talk about whether a young adult work is commercial or literary; the two are still in sync, and everyone's benefitting.
Eliot Schrefer
#18. The physical act of meditating by closing one's eyes and slowing down the speed of internal thoughts - especially worrisome thinking - results in a physiological response that is well documented in the scientific literature.
Tim McCarthy
#19. It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have a go and see if I could do it.
Penelope Lively
#20. One of the great themes in American literature is the individual's confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent.
Justin Cronin
#21. Real literature, like travel, is always a surprise.
Alison Lurie
#22. I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.
Per Petterson
#23. What hadn't been realized in the literature until now is that merely to describe how severely something has been tested in the past itself embodies inductive assumptions, even as a statement about the past.
Robert Nozick
#24. All literature and popular art contain themes that resonate with the audience.
Daniel Lambert
#25. All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
Ernest Hemingway,
#26. My favorite way to wake up is to have a certain French movie star whisper to me softly at two-thirty in the afternoon that if I want to get to Sweden in time to pick up my Nobel Prize for Literature, I had better ring for breakfast. This occurs rather less often than one might wish.
Fran Lebowitz
#27. A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
Northrop Frye
#29. She had begun to read in the beginning as a protection from the frightening and unpleasant things. She continued because, apart from the story, literature brought with it a kind of gentility for which she craved.
Patrick White
#30. This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
Northrop Frye
#31. It has been said that no great work in literature or in science was ever wrought by a man who did not love solitude. We may lay it down as an elemental principle of religion, that no large growth in holiness was ever gained by one who did not take time to be often long alone with God.
Austin Phelps
#32. Science is like literature, a continuing dialog among diverse and conflicting voices, no one ever wholly right or wholly wrong, but a steady conversation forever provisional and personal and living.
Gregory Benford
#33. As a writer I have persisted in my uncertainty, alternating between novels which could charitably be considered literature and world reporting which by another stretch of objective standards might be called history.
James A. Michener
#34. The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell.
Henry David Thoreau
#35. Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.
Rebecca West
#36. Literature is an ethical leap. It is a moral decision. A perilous exercise in constant failure. Literature should have grievances, because there are so many grievances in the world.
Miguel Syjuco
#37. The makers of literature are those who have seen and felt the miraculous interestingness of the universe. If you have formed ... literary taste ... your life will be one long ecstasy of denying that the world is a dull place.
Arnold Bennett
#38. I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.
Stephen Greenblatt
#39. A writer has a use for his experiences that most civilians simply don't; he or she discerns material in situations that others simply live through. Perhaps there are some who disapprove of this, but without this double consciousness, literature would not get made at all.
Walter Kirn
#40. I was kidnapped by literature at a young age and never wanted to be ransomed.
Margaret Atwood
#41. It isn't pleasant to surrender to the hegemony of a nation which is still wild and primitive, and to concede the absolute superiority of its customs and institutions, science and technology, literature and art. Must one sacrifice so much in the name of the unity of mankind?
Czeslaw Milosz
#42. There have been a number of us working very, very hard to bring myth and fairy tales into public consciousness, through fantasy literature and other media. I hope we're succeeding in some small way.
Terri Windling
#43. Literature took the place in my life that had once been occupied by religion: it absorbed me entirely, and transfigured my life.
Simone De Beauvoir
#44. The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#45. There is a broad cultural current that conveys the idea that a film is like a football team, it represents a nation, it is illustrated literature, filmed radio. These are outdated concepts, totally out of touch with today's realities.
Jean-Jacques Annaud
#46. I grew up reading Holocaust literature at the beach, Gulag literature on winter holidays, Vietnam memoirs on spring break.
Michael Hastings
#47. The relation between life and literature - a final antimony - is one of mutual plagiarism.
Mary McCarthy
#48. I like European and South American literature, but mostly I read nonfiction.
Jessa Crispin
#49. I feel a lot of adult fiction looks down on plot as a lesser form of literature.
Lauren Oliver
#50. So much of young adult literature has turned dark, almost pathological. It's almost as if there is a race to see who can be the most dysfunctional.
Richard Paul Evans
#51. Like most kids growing up, I had a very wide interest. I was interested in everything. I tried to take advantage of everything, from the sciences to music to writing to literature.
Michael P. Anderson
#52. Literature led me to freedom, not the other way round.
Ismail Kadare
#53. Literature is a vast bazaar where customers come to purchase everything except mirrors.
James Branch Cabell
#54. Half of all the great art and literature in existence went unrecognised during the lifetimes of its creators.
Alastair Reynolds
#55. The world of literature has no boundaries for words are lighter than air.
Nanette L. Avery
#56. The rise to prominence of the Saudi novel in Arabic is the great man-bites-dog of recent world literature. Saudi Arabia is a country without a free press, where European styles and forms are distrusted and where the female half of the population became literate only in this generation.
James Buchan
#57. Literature is both my joy and my comfort: it can add to every happiness and there is no sorrow it cannot console.
Pliny The Younger
#58. I studied English literature; I took 2 independent religion classes, but I wasn't a religion major really.
Maggie Gyllenhaal
#59. Literature's father figures can only loom, intimidate, and inspire for so long before they must be slain by their offspring.
Larry McCaffery
#60. Judaism has always been a strong interest of mine. My two sons speak Hebrew and are familiar with the scriptures and with rabbinic literature. This is the way we live.
Herman Wouk
#61. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature.
Ernest Hemingway,
#62. Literature is greater than any of us, dammit.
Romain Gary
#63. Literature is ... a game, but it's a game one can put one's life into.
Julio Cortazar
#64. Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.
Jean Cocteau
#65. Winner of the "Booker of Bookers," Midnight's Children is the novel that can be said to have done for Indian literature what One Hundred Years of Solitude did for the literature of the Americas, exciting a boom whose echoes have yet to fade.
Salman Rushdie
#66. I was lucky enough to be a child during the renaissance of Australian children's literature, when people like Ivan Southall, Colin Thiele, Lilith Norman and Wrightson were pumping out hugely inspiring stuff.
Catherine Jinks
#67. If we turn to early Irish literature, as we naturally may, to see what sort of people the Irish were in the infancy of the race, we find ourselves wandering in delighted bewilderment through a darkness shot with lightning and purple flame.
Sean O Faolain
#68. Such a superiority do the pursuits of literature possess above every other occupation, that even he who attains but a mediocrity in them, merits the pre-eminence above those that excel the most in the common and vulgar professions.
David Hume
#69. Few nations match our rich resource of literature.
Charles Clarke
#71. There must always be some pretentiousness about literature, or else no one would take its pains or endure its disappointments.
Glenway Wescott
#72. States of soul rightly expressed, as the poet expresses them in moments of pure inspiration, retain forever the power of creating like states. It is this that makes genuine literature a vital force.
John Lancaster Spalding
#73. In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.
Charles Baudelaire
#74. I don't really need to be inspired by literature though. At the end of the day it's colour and imagery moved around until it works.
Danny Fox
#75. [ ... ] and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds.
Vladimir Nabokov
#76. I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
Ben Okri
#77. I launched into a discourse on the gradual contraction of medieval oaths invoking the Virgin Mother Mary's menstrual blood and the seepage of Christ's wounds, astounded to find any use for my college study of medieval literature.
Hope Jahren
#78. But literature is unique. To understand literature, you read it with your head, but you interpret it with your heart. The two are forced to work together-and, quite frankly, they often don't get along.
Camron Wright
#79. When I went to college, I majored in American literature, which was unusual then. But it meant that I was broadly exposed to nineteenth-century American literature. I became interested in the way that American writers used metaphoric language, starting with Emerson.
Marilynne Robinson
#80. Good children's literature appeals not only to the child in the adult, but to the adult in the child.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#81. That was the chief difference between literature and life. In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is high; in reality, very low.
Aldous Huxley
#82. Hollywood is a narcotic, not a stimulant. It wants to sell you something. Literature wants to tell you something.
Rex Murphy
#83. I've been missing Japanese literature so much of late.
Utada Hikaru
#84. With virtual reality, I'm not interested in the novelty factor. I'm interested in the foundations for a medium that could be more powerful than cinema, than theatre, than literature, than any other medium we've had before to connect one human being to another.
Chris Milk
#86. Medicine is my life, but literature is my mistress, and mysteries and poetry are my drugs of choice.
John A. Vanek
#87. You don't bother to memorise the literature - you learn to read and keep a shelf of books.
John Brunner
#88. If American literature has a few heroes, Miller is one of them. He refused to name names at the McCarthy hearings, and his play 'The Crucible' analysed the hearings in the context of a previous American mass psychosis, the Salem witch trials.
Jane Smiley
#89. I think cinema is linked to literature by a lot of social ways. Our brains are full of literature - my brain is.
Claire Denis
#90. I worked in the mechanical factories repairing cement trucks. The Cuban government wanted me to work in the university as a teacher in literature, but I declined because I wanted a more sense of the countryside.
Huey Newton
#91. What literature could accomplish by way of moral education was less instruction than an expansion of our capacity for empathy: it admits us to experiences other than our own.
Laura Miller
#92. Literature is the only access to truth we have on this planet.
Stephen Fry
#93. He wondered what book he might be reading when he finally breathed his last, and determined to grab a good one as soon as he sensed the end coming so that whoever discovered him would know he had a good taste in literature.
Andrew Peterson
#94. Literature has nothing to do with usefulness; the most useful place in any house is the toilet.
Theophile Gautier
#95. The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie.
James Dickey
#96. Ralph also took some classes in philosophy and literature and felt himself on the brink of some kind of huge discovery about himself. But it never came.
Raymond Carver
#97. I want to knock on people's doors and preach. But I also meet a lot of people on planes and in restaurants, and you can preach with them or place some literature with them.
Serena Williams
#98. Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy. It's purpose is to discern the consequences of various ways of allocating resources which have alternative uses. It has nothing to say about philosophy or values, anymore than it has to say about music or literature.
Thomas Sowell
#99. The whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it's called in the old literature, is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another.
Terence McKenna
#100. The East was no longer a threat to the western world, and when there's nothing to fear we turn our backs, we look elsewhere. Eastern literature is still the poor relative that everyone wants to forget, the Cinderella who hasn't (yet) found her prince.
Dumitru Tepeneag
