Quotes about literature

"There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however na?ve that may have been, it was a good deal less na?ve than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end."

O'Connor, Flannery on literature   

"The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature."

Orwell, George on literature   

"The existence of good bad literature --the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously --is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration."

Orwell, George on literature   

"The truth is that literature, particularly fiction, is not the pure medium we sometimes assume it to be. Response to it is affected by things other than its own intrinsic quality; by a curiosity or lack of it about the people it deals with, their outlook, their way of life."

Palmer, Vance on literature   

"Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow."

Pavese, Cesare on literature
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"Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history."

Paz, Octavio on literature   

"Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!"

Pirandello, Luigi on literature   

"The cultivation of literary pursuits forms the basis of all sciences, and in their perfection consist the reputation and prosperity of kingdoms."

Pombal, Marques De on literature   

"Literature is news that stays news."

Pound, Ezra on literature   

"If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays."

Pound, Ezra on literature   

"Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree."

Pound, Ezra on literature   

"Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use."

Pound, Ezra on literature   

"The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity."

Pound, Ezra on literature   

"The party of God and the party of Literature have more in common than either will admit; their texts may conflict, but their bigotries coincide. Both insist on being the sole custodians of the true word and its only interpreters."

Raphael, Frederic on literature   

"Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money."

Renard, Jules on literature
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"There can be no literary equivalent to truth."

Riding, Laura on literature   

"The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected."

Rushdie, Salman on literature   

"The only privilege literature deserves -- and this privilege it requires in order to exist -- is the privilege of being in the arena of discourse, the place where the struggle of our languages can be acted out."

Rushdie, Salman on literature   

"Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart."

Rushdie, Salman on literature   

"Just as the office worker dreams of murdering his hated boss and so is saved from really murdering him, so it is with the author; with his great dreams he helps his readers to survive, to avoid their worst intentions. And society, without realizing it respects and even exalts him, albeit with a kind of jealousy, fear and even repulsion, since few people want to discover the horrors that lurk in the depths of their souls. This is the highest mission of great literature, and there is no other."

Sabato, Ernesto on literature   

"Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal."

Sagan, Francoise on literature   

"If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble."

Sartre, Jean-Paul on literature   

"Literature is the immortality of speech."

Schlegel, August Wilhelm Von on literature   

"Leisure without literature is death and burial alive."

Seneca on literature   

"In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it."

Shaw, George Bernard on literature   

"Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers -- such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a fa?ade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read."

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander on literature   

"Perversity is the muse of modern literature."

Sontag, Susan on literature   

"Remarks are not literature."

Stein, Gertrude on literature   

"How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?"

Stevens, Wallace on literature   

"As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible."

Stevens, Wallace on literature   

"Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility."

Stevens, Wallace on literature   

"By and large the literature of a democracy will never exhibit the order, regularity, skill, and art characteristic of aristocratic literature; formal qualities will be neglected or actually despised. The style will often be strange, incorrect, overburdened, and loose, and almost always strong and bold. Writers will be more anxious to work quickly than to perfect details. Short works will be commoner than long books, wit than erudition, imagination than depth. There will be a rude and untutored vigor of thought with great variety and singular fecundity. Authors will strive to astonish more than to please, and to stir passions rather than to charm taste."

Tocqueville, Alexis De on literature   

"Already the writers are complaining that there is too much freedom. They need some pressure. The worse your daily life, the better your art. If you have to be careful because of oppression and censorship, this pressure produces diamonds."

Tolstaya, Tatyana on literature   

"Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing -- he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him."

Trilling, Lionel on literature   

"The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive."

Trilling, Lionel on literature   

"Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty."

Trilling, Lionel on literature   

"The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors."

Tzara, Tristan on literature   

"I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views."

Wharton, Edith on literature   

"Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature."

Wilde, Oscar on literature   

"The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read."

Wilde, Oscar on literature
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