Top 100 Quotes About Writing And Literature
#1. In a way, 'Billy Elliot' was autobiographical. I can't dance, but I think his dancing was me discovering about writing and literature.
Lee Hall
#2. This was my first indication of the quality I feel is most characteristic of Zora's work: racial health; a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature.
Alice Walker
#3. A form of art that I like is portraiture. I've been thinking about portraiture, and its relationship to writing and literature, biography and autobiography, and so that will be my next thing.
Robert Dessaix
#4. I think the job of writing and literature is to encourage each one of us to believe that we're living in a story.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#5. 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. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#11. The science fiction I write comes from a pretty deep pool of literature, not just from the reflection of other science fiction films, and I think that gives me somewhat deeper roots.
Jon Spaihts
#12. I love the walking contradiction of the body. I want to make corporeal characters, corporeal writing, I want to bring the intensities and contradictions and beauty and violence and stench and desire and astonishing physicality of the body back into literature.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#13. I went to school to study literature and writing, even though I didn't end up really doing that in the end.
Gaby Hoffmann
#14. The best thing about being a writer is that 'work' is always something you love, plus usually accompanied by tea, coffee and cakes of some sort.
Jamie L. Harding
#15. Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.
Oscar Wilde
#16. Amazing, really, to think of what a man could achieve with the simple ability to put pen to paper and spin a decent yarn.
Graham Moore
#17. He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.
Stephen King
#18. Writing, acting, music, comedy. A deep love of literature and books. Thank God for all the artists who've helped me.
Bill Hicks
#19. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
J.D. Salinger
#20. 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
#22. There is nothing like literature: I lose a cow, I write about her death, and my writing pays me enough to buy another cow.
Jules Renard
#23. Writers, that deep dark secret is not something you should hide from the world. It is your gift. Take it from memory and illuminate it in literature,shake the dust from it, unless it will get you arrested, lol.
Kevin R. Hill
#24. 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
#25. I became a feminist activist propelled in part by outrage and despair, and a stubborn determination to shape a life, and create a literature, that was not a lie.
Dorothy Allison
#26. 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
#27. The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#28. Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.
Sara Sheridan
#29. You've got to love libraries. You've got to love books. You've got to love poetry. You've got to love everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it.
Ray Bradbury
#30. Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.
Ernest Hemingway,
#31. A writers desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature, and he'll start by imitating whatever he's read, which usually means what the people around him are writing.
Northrop Frye
#32. People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves.
Harold Bloom
#33. I first encountered Bradbury's writing when I was pretty young. He's a great bridge author between young-adult fiction and literature.
Sam Weller
#34. Good writing is almost the concomitant of good history. Literature and history were joined long since by the powers which shaped the human brain; we cannot put them asunder.
C.V. Wedgwood
#35. Speech is the body part of thinking, the voice of the mind. Writing is the blood and mind mixing to speak through the fingers, through the hands.
Lenora Champagne
#36. It's very fluid, this space between philosophy and literature, and that's something that resonates for me.
Tom McCarthy
#37. I still maintain that the times get precisely the literature that they deserve, and that if the writing of this period is gloomy the gloom is not so much inherent in the literature as in the times.
Bill Styron
#38. 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
#39. If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn't write a single word, but that would be tragic.
Dejan Stojanovic
#42. Take the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or beauty or form, we are borrowers.
Wendell Phillips
#43. I do not put myself in a box and say, for instance, I'm writing post-colonial literature. I don't know what I'm writing. That's the business of professors and critics. My job is to tell a story, and that's it.
Isabel Allende
#44. I think myself I ought to be shot for writing such nonsense ... But it's unquestionably good escapist literature and I think I should rather like it if I were sitting in an air-raid shelter or recovering from flu.
Georgette Heyer
#45. We speak about understanding each other, having those conversations nationwide - culturally, historically - and yet there's a lot of gaps. So I want to assist with closing the gap of knowing about and hearing about our Latino communities in terms of literature, in terms of writing.
Juan Felipe Herrera
#46. Strong themes and styles have to be broken down before literature can come into being. It is this breaking down that is called "writing." Writing is more about destroying than creating.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#47. I don't want to take up literature in a money-making spirit, or be very anxious about making large profits, but selling it at a loss is another thing altogether, and an amusement I cannot well afford.
Lewis Carroll
#48. A book can never be anything more than the impress of its author's thoughts; and the value of these will lie either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form which his thoughts take, in other words, what it is that he has thought about it.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#49. I think the novel is a wonder....it has vitality to an extraordinary degree, and glamour, and a great deal of underlying thought of unusual quality....And as for the sheer writing, it's astonishing. [About The Great Gatsby]
Maxwell Perkins
#50. I think that Oprah's on a mission to improve the lives of the average American in various ways. And one of them is to bring literature to people who would normally not be quite as demanding in their reading tastes, to show them writing that can be more than just entertainment.
Janet Fitch
#51. My first true lesson in writing came from Mr. Bowden when I was 16. At my high school, he was the teacher known to be the very best at literature and writing.
Jeff Lindsay
#52. Darkness crept through. Shadows pried at doors, teased dull edges of recollections that never quite took hold. Memories that would have shriveled under the blinding sun of daylight. And reason.
Edward Fahey
#53. Writing is about taking everyday observations, things which people see almost every day of their lives, and yet bringing it to their attention for the very first time.
Jamie L. Harding
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. What does literature do for me? I think I solve problems in my writing. They may be my problems, but perhaps others share them, and in the process of working these through, I hope to entertain.
Sabina Murray
#58. Writing evinces the soul of an active mind and every era produced persons whom devoted their being to exploring the mysteries of life, seeking to discern answers pertaining how to resolve the complexities and paradoxes of life.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#59. There is a very big difference between writing for children and writing for young adults. The first thing I would say is that 'Young Adult' does not mean 'Older Children', it really does mean young but adult, and the category should be seen as a subset of adult literature, not of children's books.
Garth Nix
#60. God produced great writing, a matter of first importance to a man like Lincoln, ever impressed with the nature of cause and forces.
Richard Brookhiser
#62. I called it a baptism in flaming ink that forced me to shed my shyness about recognizing myself as a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in the matter. And then I had to discover exactly what that meant.
Aberjhani
#63. What is hell to a writer? Hell is being too busy to find the time to write or being unable to find the inspiration. Hell is suddenly finding the words but being away from your notebook or typewriter. Hell is when the verses slip away through your fingers and they never return again.
R.M. Engelhardt
#64. The River Mogami has drowned
Far and deep
Beneath its surging waves
The flaming sun of summer
Matsuo Basho
#65. I imagine as long as people will continue to read novels, people will continue to write them, or vice versa; unless of course the pictorial magazines and comic strips finally atrophy man's capacity to read, and literature really is on its way back to the picture writing in the Neanderthal cave.
William Faulkner
#66. I don't see myself as a very important person. But I was the second woman to write a novel in Iran, and I have written most of the novels about Iranian women. In this way, maybe I have a good place in Iranian literature.
Shahrnush Parsipur
#67. The writer is neither saint nor tzaddik nor prophet standing at the gate; he's just another sinner who has a somewhat sharper awareness and uses slightly more precise language to describe the inconceivable reality of our world.
Etgar Keret
#68. When I look back at what I've written and try to explain it, it doesn't help, but it helps to be in a process of writing. It's the same thing with reading - you lose yourself when you read as well. When I was younger I used literature that way, it was just escapism, a tool to run away from things.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#69. Graphic novels are not traditional literature, but that does not mean they are second-rate. Images are a way of writing. When you have the talent to be able to write and to draw, it seems a shame to choose one. I think it's better to do both.
Marjane Satrapi
#70. Literature has done great work for feminism - writing and reading are a practice of empathy - and great literature will continue to do so.
Julianna Baggott
#71. He did not wholly understand the intricate play of ideas and the complex phrases, but as he read he sensed a strong, who purpose behind the words and he felt that he almost understood.
Carson McCullers
#72. The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.
Augusten Burroughs
#73. Expediency of literature, reason of literature, lawfulness of writing down a thought, is questioned; much is to say on both sides,and, while the fight waxes hot, thou, dearest scholar, stick to thy foolish task, add a line every hour, and between whiles add a line.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#74. Others may write from the head, but he writes from the heart, and the heart will always understand him.
Washington Irving
#75. In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it.
Jacques Derrida
#76. Writers who teach tend to prefer literary theory to literature and tenure to all else. Writers who do not teach prefer the contemplation of Careers to art of any kind.
Gore Vidal
#77. The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.
T. S. Eliot
#78. Current "literature" [is] well-written books in which disgusting people do disgusting things to other disgusting people for no apparent reason and with no apparent resolution.
Roberta Gellis
#79. Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age of relentless humiliations - that we are more than ourselves; that we have souls.
Richard Flanagan
#80. Its badness is so potent that it seems to undermine the very idea of literature, to expose the whole endeavour of making art out of language as essentially and irredeemably fraudulent
Mark O'Connell
#81. The only reward to be expected from literature is contempt if one fails and hatred if one succeeds.
Voltaire
#82. The characters act for reasons that they can't control and, as readers, we have to believe in their motivations, their sense of choice and in the reality of their suffering, even though, deep down, we know it's all just puppetry on the part of the writer.
Johnny Rich
#83. (the modern writer's aim is) general revelation by suggestion (and) making a very tiny part do for a whole.
Sean O'Faolain
#84. The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
William Styron
#85. Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.
Robert Bringhurst
#86. It was evident to me then that I existed in the same manner as all other men, that I must grow old, that I must die like them, and that among them I was to be distinguished merely as one of those who have no aptitude for writing. And so, utterly despondent, I renounced literature for ever,
Marcel Proust
#87. I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.
Robert Caro
#88. Without books, everything would have been crooked. Without books, the wisdom in books today would have been fairy and folk tales. Without books the whole truth about life would have been imaginations and a guessing game
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#89. If a bloke gave you a hundred quid for a book you can bet your life it's his way, but if all the poor and suffering people raise their hats to you for writing it - that's different; it makes it worthwhile then.
Alan Marshall
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. Our lives are greatly enriched when we immerse ourselves in literature and spiritual writing, not because we are going to be tested but purely for the sake of enrichment.
Wayne W. Dyer
#93. The world is changing from day to day; it is high time for our writers to take off their masks, look frankly, keenly, and boldly at life, and write about real flesh and blood. It is high time for a brand-new arena for literature, high time for some bold fighters to charge headlong into battle!
Lu Xun
#94. Sometimes, I marvel at the wonder
of how graceful words seem to appear
pen to paper; in others' hands
And I think to myself-
oh, how obsolete my existence is,
to be unable to do the same.
Joy Chua
#95. When I started writing and illustrating, I knew little of classic children's literature. My stories came from real life, from my concerns about what was happening in the world.
Michael Foreman
#96. What you read when you don't have to ...
Oscar Wilde
#97. Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart.
H.G.Wells
#98. I spent years in a graduate literature program learning what makes great writing, and the only conclusion we came to was that the future of graduate literature programs was safe because nobody is ever going to agree on what makes great writing.
Brandon Sanderson
#99. When I first began writing, and I told people what I wrote, I'd get a blank stare and sometimes a 'Huh?' They weren't sure what young adult literature was. Now everyone knows.
Mary E. Pearson
#100. Literature is what you write when you think you should be saying something. Writing begins when you'd rather be doing anything else: and you've just done it.
Kenneth Patchen
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