Quotes about literature

"Only the more rugged mortals should attempt to keep up with current literature."

Age, George on literature   

"Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity."

Algren, Nelson on literature   

"The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation."

Appelfeld, Aharon on literature   

"If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor."

Auden, W. H. on literature   

"Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books."

Bachelard, Gaston on literature
3 fans of this quote   

"Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it."

Barthes, Roland on literature   

"In the present age, alas! our pens are ravished by unlettered authors and unmannered critics, that make a havoc rather than a building, a wilderness rather than a garden. But, a lack! what boots it to drop tears upon the preterit?"

Beardsley, Aubrey on literature   

"Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet, your works will contain them without your knowledge -- they will be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely."

Belinsky, Vissarion on literature   

"The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible."

Blair, Hugh on literature   

"Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read."

Borges, Jorge Luis on literature   

"A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug."

Borrow, George on literature   

"All literature is political."

Burton, LeVar on literature   

"English literature is a kind of training in social ethics. English trains you to handle a body of information in a way that is conducive to action."

Butler, Marilyn on literature   

"The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary."

Calvino, Italo on literature   

"When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign -- a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don't want to hear the word mentioned."

Calvino, Italo on literature   

"All literature is gossip."

Capote, Truman on literature   

"There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write."

Carlyle, Thomas on literature   

"When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball."

Chandler, Raymond on literature   

"Speak of the moderns without contempt, and of the ancients without idolatry."

Chesterfield, Lord on literature   

"The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order."

Cocteau, Jean on literature   

"One learns little more about a man from his feats of literary memory than from the feats of his alimentary canal."

Colby, Frank Moore on literature   

"Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise above its source, so it is true that a national literature cannot rise above the moral level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its inspiration."

Connolly, James on literature   

"The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it."

Drew, Elizabeth on literature
4 fans of this quote   

"Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished bride of quietness, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary."

Eagleton, Terry on literature   

"When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behavior by his attitude towards the result of the behavior arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way."

Eliot, T. S. on literature   

"People do not deserve to have good writings; they are so pleased with the bad."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on literature   

"If you look at history you'll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict."

Erasmus, Desiderius on literature   

"The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since."

Faulkner, William on literature   

"To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature."

Fischer, Ernst on literature   

"Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst."

Ford, Ford Madox on literature   

"In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented."

Frye, Northrop on literature   

"Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason."

Gide, Andre on literature
3 fans of this quote   

"Literature, as a field of glory, is an arena where a tomb may be more easily found than laurels; and as a means of support, it is the chance of chances."

Giles, Henry on literature   

"The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency."

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von on literature   

"One of the proud joys of the man of letters --if that man of letters is an artist is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world's memory."

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De on literature   

"It is the story-teller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval."

Greene, Graham on literature   

"A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can."

Hamilton, Edith on literature   

"A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate"

Hampton, Christopher on literature   

"The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it."

Havel, Vaclav on literature   

"I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions."

Havel, Vaclav on literature