Top 100 Quotes About The Best Literature
#1. 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
#2. No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
#3. I think that the best literature has a core that you can't lock to a time or place but that can generate lots of meanings and translations.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#4. The best way to know the soul of another country is to read its literature.
Amos Oz
#5. 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
#6. The ultimate function of literature is to appreciate the world, sometimes indignantly, sometimes sorrowfully, but best of all to praise when it is luckily possible.
John Dewey
#7. Good taste cannot supply the place of genius in literature, for the best proof of taste, when there is no genius, would be, not to write at all.
Madame De Stael
#8. A critic at best is a waiter at the great table of literature.
Louis Dudek
#9. The novels that get praised in the NY Review of Books aren't worth reading. Ninety-seven percent of science fiction is adolescent rubbish, but good science fiction is the best and only literature of our times.
Robert Anton Wilson
#10. What great literature does best is to show us those moments which make life worth living.
Marty Rubin
#11. There are still some people out there who believe comic books are nothing more than, well, comic books. But the true cognoscenti know graphic novels are - at their best - an amazing blend of art literature and the theater of the mind.
John Ridley
#12. Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.
David Brin
#13. 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
#14. These weren't cheap modern books; these were books bound in leather, and not just leather, but leather from clever cows who had given their lives for literature after a happy existence in the very best pastures.
Terry Pratchett
#15. 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
#16. The habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#17. Reading books is a way for you to communicate with and learn from the best thinkers that are writing today and that have ever lived.
Joshua Rogers
#18. One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.
George Saintsbury
#19. The important thing is to do what you most love in the best way. If you love literature, you could be a great writer and perhaps one day become a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature.
Aaron Ciechanover
#20. 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
#21. A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.
Siri Hustvedt
#22. Without a sense of place the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego.
William Kennedy
#23. Literature offers us all, writers and readers, the best method of discovering and retelling the changing story of ourselves. The story is both journey and surprise. And as everyone knows, even the past is altered, depending on, not the facts, but the interpretation.
Jeanette Winterson
#24. The best books - like the best music or television or movies or comics or video games - can challenge us and force us to think or perceive aspects of life that we may prefer to avoid. In a sense, they threaten us.
Geoffrey Reiter
#25. America is a nation of liars, and for that reason science fiction has a special claim to be our national literature, as the art form best adapted to telling the lies we like to hear and to pretend we believe.
Thomas M. Disch
#26. Science fiction and fantasy literature has always been defined by tales of heroism. It is meant to represent humanity at our very best, willing to oppose all odds in order to protect the side of good.
Mira Grant
#27. 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
#28. [Literature is] the best way of telling the truth; it's a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.
Julian Barnes
#29. The best dancer is the one who isn't even aware that she is dancing!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#30. 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
#31. The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There's a vast literature of outstanding writing on the subject.
Ian McEwan
#32. ...because there's a secret order. The books, you can't place them random. The other day I put Cervantes next to Tolstoj.
And I thought, if close to Anna Karenina we have Don Quixote, sure the latter will do his best to save her.
Ettore Scola
#33. The best work of literature to represent the American Dream is 'The Great Gatsby' by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It shows us how dreaming can be tainted by reality, and that if you don't compromise, you may suffer.
Azar Nafisi
#34. Literature is the best thing humanity has. Poetry is the heart of literature, the highest concentration of everything that is the best in the world and in man. It is the only true food for your soul
Lyudmila Ulitskaya
#35. I studied psychology in school, and the best psychology is in literature. It's so much easier to understand a character than a theory. You can recognize yourself - or other people - in a different way.
Natalie Portman
#36. But literature, the best of it, does not aim to be literature. It wants and strives, beyond that artifact part of itself, to be a true part of the composite human record - that is, not words but a reality.
Mary Oliver
#37. My mother's influence in molding my character was conspicuous. She forced me to learn daily long chapters of the Bible by heart. To that discipline and patient, accurate resolve I owe not only much of my general power of taking pains, but of the best part of my taste for literature.
John Ruskin
#38. The best kind of writing is that which comes from the authors soul.
Ndiritu Wahome
#39. [On collectors of quotations:] How far our literature may in future suffer from these blighting swarms, will best be conceived by a glance at what they have already withered and blasted of the favourite productions of our most popular poets ...
Maria Edgeworth
#40. Many of the greatest books are like a forest. The best way to get to know them is to wander right into the middle and get lost.
Anthony Esolen
#42. The word 'NO' is the best motivation there is for the storyteller in you.
A.K. Kuykendall
#43. One is not quite certain that creativeness in the arts, literature, and science functions best in an environment of absolute freedom. Chances are that a relatively mild tyranny stimulates creativeness.
Eric Hoffer
#45. I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken - and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived.
Margaret Mitchell
#46. When I was at school, I was terrible at algebra and arithmetic, but I was always the best at English and literature. And acting, of course.
Joan Collins
#47. Nervous states of the worst sort control me without pause. Everything that is not literature bores me and I hate it. I lack all aptitude for family life except, at best, as an observer. I have no family feeling and visitors make me almost feel as though I were maliciously being attacked.
Franz Kafka
#49. Literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.
Amy Bloom
#50. The best brothel-scenes in literature have been written, without exception, by pious believers or pious unbelievers.
George Orwell
#51. [T]he effects of general change [in literature] are most tellingly recorded not in alteration of the best products, but in the transformation of the most ordinary workaday books; for when potboilers adopt the new style, then the revolution is complete.
Stephen Jay Gould
#52. Jane Austen may not be the best writer, but she certainly writes about the best people. And by that I mean people just like me.
Anna Quindlen
#53. Theatre for a New Audience is one of America's most admirable and exciting theatre companites ... some of the best acted and directed work to be found on American stages, engaging with the canon of world dramatic literature in a vigorous way.
Tony Kushner
#54. What makes human life meaningful? I still felt literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain.
Paul Kalanithi
#55. The best thing you can give to a child is to create an environment where the child can develop an independent mind so that he will be the man of no one and the instrument of no system!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#56. It is the best way to write poetry, letting things come. -Winnie-the-Pooh
A.A. Milne
#57. We are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence.
William Butler Yeats
#58. The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called 'significant literature' will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles.
Raymond Chandler
#59. Kim Newman's Anno Dracula is back in print, and we must celebrate. It was the first mash-up of literature, history and vampires, and now, in a world in which vampires are everywhere, it's still the best, and its bite is just as sharp. Compulsory reading, commentary, and mindgame: glorious.
Neil Gaiman
#60. Anything can become a children's book if you give it to a child ... Children are actually the best (and worst) audience for literature because they have no patience with pretence.
Orson Scott Card
#61. I would rather do a good hours work weeding than write two pages of my best; nothing is so interesting as weeding. I went crazy over the outdoor work, and at last had to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by the board.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#62. We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.
Vladimir Nabokov
#63. A skunk is walking by. Skunks don't hurry or hide. The dogs and cats pretend not to notice them. It is best not to.
Alice Provensen
#64. Understand is not the word; you are right, you can never really 'understand' about someone, anyone, even yourself. It is best to believe in them as human; feel that they are alive like you and need warmth, concern.
Rudy Wiebe
#65. At the age of 12 I won the school prize for Best English Essay. The prize was a copy of Somerset Maugham's 'Introduction To Modern English And American Literature.' To this day I keep it on the shelf between my collection of Forester's works and the little urn that contains my mother's ashes.
Wilbur Smith
#66. Reading great works of literature, discovering poetry, and listening to the best composers are all ways that we learn to love the Creator more.
Jennifer A. Marshall
#67. Half the time, in this life, you wouldn't know where you are nor when. There are moments of unpleasant liveliness. Tamp that the fuck down is best.
Kevin Barry
#68. I have never had the lust to meet famous authors; the best of them is in their books.
Michael Gold
#69. Potential enemies make the best friends and lovers. Many a blessed union begins in adversity.
Randy Thornhorn
#70. Despite your best efforts, you could not invent a better police force for literature than criticism and the author's own conscience.
Anton Chekhov
#71. The best thing is to walk on the right path without looking back, without knowing who is following you because you must walk with your own speed, with your own freedom! Your followers will catch you or your ideas somehow somewhere ahead, somewhere in time!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#72. The want of an international Copy-Right Law, by rendering it nearly impossible to obtain anything from the booksellers in the wayof remuneration for literary labor, has had the effect of forcing many of our very best writers into the service of the Magazines and Reviews.
Edgar Allan Poe
#73. And what does a person with such romantic temperament seek in the study of the classics?
If by romantic you mean solitary and introspective, I think romantics are frequently the best classicists.
Donna Tartt
#74. 'Jane Eyre,' when I think of that book, it conjures up the best moments of college English courses. Literature is extraordinary, especially when you have a good professor.
Edward P. Jones
#75. 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
#76. I nearly fell asleep over Dickens in English. Mind you, he's snoozeworthy at the best of times.
Jo Walton
#77. When you're used to being in dangerous situations, you develop a sixth sense about your surroundings, about where possible enemies might be lurking, how many steps it will take to reach the next corner on a dead run, the best hiding places if bullets start to fly...
Mark Zero
#78. I do not just want you at your best.
I almost do not care
where your Happiness lives,
but please,
let me visit your pain?
Take me to the place
where your sadness goes,
and show me the tragedy
that no one knows.
Meraaqi
#79. When it comes to literature, we are all groping in the dark, even the writer. Especially the writer. And that is a good thing
maybe one of the best things about literature. It's always an adventure of some kind.
Wendy Lesser
#80. Holden Caulfield is the best character in literature, period.
Josh Hutcherson
#81. The story [Henny-Penny] has the best opening in all literature-"The sky is falling," cried Henny-Penny, "and a piece of it fell on my tail.
John Steinbeck
#82. The most advertised commodity is not always intrinsically the best; but is sometimes merely the product of a company, with plenty of money to spend on advertising.
Emily Post
#83. Reading is the gateway to so many things that helps makes it possible for seven billion people to live together on one planet. Literature is the great extra-somatic keeper of our knowledge of what it is to be human. Reading elevates us. We read to be our best selves.
Nicola Griffith
#84. the whole point of literature, I think, is that it's the best technology we have for communicating what another person's life feels like from the inside.
Garth Greenwell
#85. People may think of Southern humor in terms of missing teeth and outhouse accidents, but the best of it is a rich vein running through the best of Southern literature.
Roy Blount Jr.
#86. Young man! If my notes should fall into your hands, remember that the best and most enduring changes are those which stem from an improvement in moral behaviour, without any violent upheaval.
Alexander Pushkin
#87. Don Quixote is the best book out there on political theory, followed by Hamlet and Macbeth. There is no better way to understand the tragedy and the comedy of the Mexican political system than Hamlet, Macbeth and Don Quixote. They're much better than any column of political analysis.
Subcomandante Marcos Laura Castellanos
#88. The popular culture gives us books that offer entertainment but no ideas. High culture gives us books that offer ideas but no entertainment. The best books manage to do both.
Gene Edward Veith Jr.
#89. It's the best way of telling the truth; it's a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts. Beyond that ... [it's] delight in, and play with, language; also, a curiously intimate way of communicating with people whom you will never meet.
Julian Barnes
#90. 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
#91. I must warn you that the books I like are not necessarily the ones I think are the best. I like them for various reasons not always easy to explain.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#92. The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend upon it for their daily bread, and the highest form of literature, poetry, brings no wealth to the singer. For producing your best work also you will require some leisure and freedom from sordid care.
Oscar Wilde
#93. The best safeguard against bad literature is a full experience of good; just as a real and affectionate acquaintance with honest people gives a better protection against rogues than a habitual distrust of everyone.
C.S. Lewis
#94. Besides being witty and funny and maybe the best novel ever written, it's also the most perfect romance in all of literature and nothing in life can ever measure up, so I spend my life limping in its shadow.
Shannon Hale
#95. There's a history of English literature where the best boils to the top, and Jane Austen stands right at the top of that.
JJ Feild
#96. I love literature deeply. I view books as sacred things, and in writing my story, I'm going to do my best to honor the form that has played such a huge part in shaping who I am.
Flea
#97. Literature is an invitation to people to discover the world of others and the world of others is the best source to understand and to improve our own world!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#98. Literature can allow us to experience the best side of humankind, where instead of giving up, we struggle desperately in the ruins for love, connection and hope.
Caroline Leavitt
#99. It also seems that the unhappy writers are the enduring writer. Hampered or limited by their suffering, literature becomes their focus and salvation, forcing them to give their best every moment of creation. Writing becomes their medicine, their way of escape, the catalyst for their imagination.
Cirilo F. Bautista
#100. Everything that is printed and bound in a book contains some echo at least of the best that is in literature.
Henry David Thoreau
