Quotes About World Of Literature

#1. I'm trying to earn a living in the way that is most enjoyable to me. I love the world of literature, and I hope to support myself in it.

Jamaica Kincaid

#2. Black children need to see their lives reflected in the books they read. If they don't, they won't feel welcome in the world of literature. The lives of African-Americans are rich and diverse, and the books our children read should reflect that.

Valerie Wilson Wesley

#3. In the world of literature, I see prizes as more of a duty to the craft itself, rather than as something for the individual.

Wole Soyinka

#4. For my part, I have worked all my life with eggs and embryos of frogs. Compared to other small animals, these have figured prominently in the world of literature.

John Gurdon

#5. People won't see Imagination in something that doesn't relate to their experience because of their own mental limitations. I want people to escape the expected and ordinary, to escape the regular expectations of a story, and truly step into a different world of literature.

Lionel Suggs

#6. It's one thing if everyone wears the same shoes or drinks the same soda. But the world of literature is the last place in which globalization should mean homogeneity.

Benjamin Moser

#7. The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.

Northrop Frye

#8. The world of science and the world of literature have much in common. Each is an international club, helping to tie mankind together across barriers of nationality, race and language. I have been doubly lucky, being accepted as a member of both.

Freeman Dyson

#9. England opened up the world of literature for me. Not really having a world of my own, I made up for my disinheritance by absorbing the world of others ... I loved them: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens ... I adopted them passionately.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

#10. The world of literature has no boundaries for words are lighter than air.

Nanette L. Avery

#11. I'm not at all snobby about book prizes and how they pollute the world of literature. Just like with the Olympics, a little bit of competition gets people truly engrossed in the business of literature.

Emma Donoghue

#12. You're just jealous because I have conquered world of literature, as well as science.

Katie Kennedy

#13. The world of literature is a sacred mirror that shows not the reality around us but the dreams and fears that reality stimulates: It's not where we live, but life itself.

Dennis Vickers

#14. The Bible is still loved by millions, read by millions, and studied by millions. It remains the most published and most read book in the world of literature.

Bernard Ramm

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born?

Jeff VanderMeer

#18. ...if you were convinced that the world had forgotten how to think and teach, if you believed it had discarded the beauty of art and literature, if you thought it had crushed the power of truth, would you let that world educate your children?

Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera

#19. The growth of the imagination demands windows-windows through which we can look out at the world and windows through which we can look into ourselves. The old stories were windows in just this way.

Katherine Paterson

#20. American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World.

Christopher Dawson

#21. I've been an avid consumer of young adult literature since I was one, and I think some people leave that stuff behind when they become old adults, but I never did. I was always interested in the fantasy world created in those novels.

Diablo Cody

#22. And I wondered if that was the problem with literature - it made sense only in theoretical situations and didn't often help in real life, where it took a hell of a lot more courage to live than to turn pages all alone, hidden away from the world in a corner or a bed or under a tree.

Matthew Quick

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

Nadeem Aslam

#24. Books are in the mind, Grandfather Alessandro said. Too many books and you forget your body is in the world.

Tom Spanbauer

#25. Literature provides us with experiences it would not be wise or possible to introduce into our own world and thus enlarges our understanding of the world.

Louise Rosenblatt

#26. Since the last decades of the nineteenth century, revolt against the objectified world has determined the character of art and literature.

Paul Tillich

#27. I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.

Alice Eve

#28. The world cannot be translated;
It can only be dreamed of and touched.

Dejan Stojanovic

#29. It perhaps might be said
if any one dared
that the most worthless literature of the world has been that which has been written by the men of one nation concerning the men of another.

Stephen Crane

#30. People didn't make life, so they can't destroy it. Even if we were to wipe out every bit of life in the world, we can't touch the place life comes from. Whatever made the plants and animals and people spring up in the first place will always be there, and life will spring up again.

Jeanne DuPrau

#31. To subvert is not the aim of literature, its value lies in discovering and revealing what is rarely known, little known, thought to be known but in fact not very well known of the truth of the human world. It would seem that truth is the unassailable and most basic quality of literature.

Gao Xingjian

#32. I don't accept the idea that literature can be just entertainment and that there is no consequences of literature in the real world.

Mario Vargas-Llosa

#33. No doubts our generation is producing another form of grub street literature.. Welcome to the world of hack writers..

Himmilicious

#34. Your father may never have produced one of those stuffy tomes we call great literature, but he left the world a substantial collection of delightful adventure stories.

David E. Fessenden

#35. At times, the reader of World War II literature must think every American, from general to G.I., kept a war diary, later mined for memoirs of the conflict. Few diaries, however, were published in their own right.

Nigel Hamilton

#36. The world of scholarship is much more measured in its appreciation and also its criticism than the world of popular literature.

Deborah Harkness

#37. The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution, but thet are everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought

Bernard Bailyn

#38. Each of us, deep down, believes that the whole world issues from his own precious body, like images projected from a tiny slide onto an earth-sized screen. And then, deeper down, each of us knows he's wrong.

Chad Harbach

#39. As for most writers, language is vital for me: a writer's ability to render a fictional world - characters, landscape, emotions - into something original that alters or deepens my understanding of both literature and life.

Dinaw Mengestu

#40. ... And the sound of the sea, like the wild-animal breath of the world itself, frightened them as it gasped and died at their feet.

Leonardo Sciascia

#41. I am conscious of a soul-sense that lifts me above the narrow, cramping circumstances of my life. My physical limitations are forgotten- my world lies upward, the length and the breadth and the sweep of the heavens are mine!

Helen Keller

#42. Some people might be surprised that 'Rambo's creator has a doctorate in American literature. One of my influences is Henry James, whose major theme is awareness. Whether I'm writing about military personnel, law enforcement, or De Quincey, the persistent theme is paying attention in a hostile world.

David Morrell

#43. 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

#44. Allen Ginsberg was a world authority on the writing of William Blake, and had an incredible knowledge of classic literature and world politics.

David Amram

#45. The literature of imaginatiion, even when tragic, is reassuring, not necessarily in the sense of offering nostalgic comfort, but because it offers a world large enough to contain alternatives and therefore offers hope.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#46. [Mark] Twain is pointing at you. You, the reader of the book one hundred and thirty years ago and today. That is what has made it a great American novel and the most widely read book in American Literature around the world today.

Hal Holbrook

#47. No matter what is happening in life or in the world - war, natural disaster, poor health, pain, the death of loved ones - if existence is filled with art, music and literature, life will be fulfilling, a joy.

Karen DeCrow

#48. One of the great advantages of the study of old Norse or Icelandic literature is the insight given by it into the origin of world-wide superstitions. Norse tradition is transparent as glacier ice, and its origin is as unmistakable.

Sabine Baring-Gould

#49. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books. (p. 5)

Rabih Alameddine

#50. I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large.

Kenzaburo Oe

#51. As writers, the world is not about individual expression entirely because we are producing works of literature and getting them out into the world.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

#52. I hated myself and the world because I had failed to face and accept the limitations of my self and of life. In literature this refusal is called romanticism; in psychology, neurosis.

Luke Rhinehart

#53. I call that creativity," Orville said. "The purpose of literature is to teach you how to THINK, not how to be practical. Learning to discover the connective tissue between seemingly unrelated events is the only way we are equipped to understand patterns in the real world.

Catherine Lowell

#54. Barack Obama is an elegant and literate man with a cosmopolitan sense of the world. He is widely read in philosophy, literature, and history - as befits a former law professor - and he has shown time and again a surprising interest in contemporary fiction.

Teju Cole

#55. Dr Piper smiled hugely like a big cherub. 'Of course it's wonderful. The whole world is wonderful. Everything is made to fit into its place. And you and Kirsty are the most wonderful of all. Just look at the way you are made.

Colin Thiele

#56. The great writers, Conrad, Maugham and Melville, spent only a few years in the South Seas, but their memory of those waters was indestructible; for the nature of life in the islands commands attention to the vivid world and its even more vivid inhabitants.

James A. Michener

#57. Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world

H.L. Mencken

#58. Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.

Phillips Brooks

#59. To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck.

Susan Sontag

#60. There is something about that moment, when literature becomes accessible, and a door of the world opens.

Lois Lowry

#61. Rabbinic literature, though it includes plenty of material from before AD 135, tends to see everything in the light, not of a continuing story about God and Israel within the ongoing flow of world history, but of the much thinner, often dehistoricized world of Torah-piety.

N. T. Wright

#62. A very small class of books have nothing in common say that each admits us to a world of its own that seems to have been going on before we stumbled into it, but which, once found by the right reader, becomes indispensable to him.

Philip Zaleski

#63. When I began I thought that literature was contained within a bubble that somehow floated above the world commented upon by newspapers. But I became more and more interested in trying to include some of that world within my work.

Ian McEwan

#64. I suppose if I had to give a one-word answer to the question of why I read, that word would be pleasure. The kind of pleasure you can get from reading is like no other in the world.

Wendy Lesser

#65. Is a lifelong student of the world's wisdom literature, it is my duty to inform students that ridding the world of evil is a goal very different from any recommended by Jesus, Buddha or Muhammad, though not so different from some recommended by Joseph Stalin, Joseph McCarthy and Mao Tse Tung.

David James Duncan

#66. The beautification of the world is not a work of nature, but a work of art, then it involves an artist.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#67. Doesn't the theory of relativity concern literature too? In our world there is no longer any room for the privileged observer, as there is none for the observer of the universe - we are all within.

Nina Berberova

#68. Writers haven't got any rockets to blast off. We don't even trundle the most insignificant auxiliary vehicle. We haven't got any military might. So what can literature do in the face of the merciless onslaught of open violence? One word of truth outweighs the whole world.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#69. No books in all the world's literature have been subjected to such thorough and persistent scrutiny over a period of hundreds of years, as the Gospels.

Kenneth Richard Samples

#70. There are days when it seems to me that in literature the most convincing depiction of the world in which we live is to be found in the phantasmagorical kingdom through which Lewis Carroll took Alice on a tour.

Dean Koontz

#71. Sex is the ... tremulous and bewildering and nerve-racking and delicious and myriad-adjectived soul-condition ... generally known as love. Ninety-nine point nine repeater percent of the world's literature has been devoted to its analysis. It's therefore of some importance.

William John Locke

#72. Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted-not taught-to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?

Michael Chabon

#73. From literature to ecology, from the escape velocity of galaxies to the greenhouse effect, from garbage disposal methods to traffic jams, everything is discussed in our world. But the democratic system, as if it were a given fact, untouchable by nature until the end of time, we don't discuss that.

Jose Saramago

#74. Literature ultimately helps one to ground a deeper and wider outlook. An over-directed life without the inner resource to step outside of itself is closed to other beauties and the complexities of character and world.

Gwee Li Sui

#75. If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're going to find them.

Elif Batuman

#76. The language of literature is the language of all the world. It is necessary to divest ourselves at once of the notion of diversified vocal and grammatical speech which constitutes the various tongues of the Earth, and conceals the identity of image and logic in the minds of all men.

George Edward Woodberry

#77. To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavour, is just a speck in the universe of possible things.

Ian McEwan

#78. The Astonishment Tapes will now take its place within the growing field of international research about postwar American poetry's important contribution to world literature. Miriam Nichols has once again done exceptional scholarship.

Peter Gizzi

#79. Our language and literature are without a doubt Britain's greatest contribution to the cultural heritage of the world.

Tessa Jowell

#80. The history of the Bible text is a romance of literature, though it is a romance of which the consequences are of vital import; and thanks to the succession of discoveries which have been made of late years, we know more about it than of the history of any other ancient book in the world.

Frederic G. Kenyon

#81. Language gradually varies, and with it fade away the writings of authors who have flourished their allotted time; otherwise, the creative powers of genius would overstock the world, and the mind would be completely bewildered in the endless mazes of literature.

Washington Irving

#82. True literature is more than just a story someone has told. It must provide the reader with the essence of the world on a moral, philosophical and emotional level.

Orhan Pamuk

#83. In literature classes, you don't learn about genes; in physics classes you don't learn about human evolution. So you get a fragmented view of the world. That makes it hard to find meaning in education.

David Christian

#84. 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

#85. The whole purport of literature ... is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.

Thornton Wilder

#86. How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions?

Polly Toynbee

#87. . . . literature is not frivolous pseudo-statements but takes its place among the acts of language that transform the world, bringing into being the things that they name.

Jonathan Culler

#88. The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.

Tom Waits

#89. Not only dowomen sufferindignities in daily life, but the literature of the world proclaims their inferiority and divinely decreed subjection in all history, sacred and profane, in science, philosophy, poetry, and song.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#90. 'The Lady's World' should be made the recognized organ for the expression of women's opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure.

Oscar Wilde

#91. Literature, fiction, poetry, whatever, makes justice in the world. That's why it almost always has to be on the side of the underdog.

Grace Paley

#92. I am always coming up with architectural metaphors when I think about writing. But I think one of the things that draw us to literature is that it gives us this very attractive illusion that there is meaning in the world - things connect.

Nicole Krauss

#93. That's really what SF is all about, you know: the big reality that pervades the real world we live in: the reality of change. Science fiction is the very literature of change. In fact, it is the only such literature we have.

Frederik Pohl

#94. 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

#95. I'm into books - I love literature, so I toyed with the idea of being an English teacher. I had a fantastic English teacher at school. I think great English teachers make the world go round.

Taron Egerton

#96. The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.

Annie Dillard

#97. It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don't have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you and suddenly there will be a story to live in.

Naomi Shihab Nye

#98. Dreams are a beautiful bride
that holds our hands to
enter a world more glorious
than this one.

Subhan Zein

#99. I was given the ability to create stories and characters. That's my part of the long chain of writers, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, and a host of others who eventually deliver literature to the world. I want to do for others what Eudora Welty did for me.

Karl Marlantes

#100. Even though what I enjoy most is literature, I would not want to live only in a world of fiction, cut off from the rest of life. No - I want to always have a foot in the street, to be inmersed in the activities of my contemporaries, in the times, in the place where I live.

Mario Vargas-Llosa