Quotes about literature




These are quotes tagged with "literature". You can also search for quotes containing the word literature.

Photo 3.jpeg about literature Photo 0.jpeg about literature Photo 1.jpeg about literature Photo 4.jpeg about literature Photo 2.jpeg about 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    Share

"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    Share

"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    Share

"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
3 fans of this quote    Share

"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    Share

"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    Share

"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    Share

"Literature is news that stays news."

Pound, Ezra on literature    Share

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

Pound, Ezra on literature    Share

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

Pound, Ezra on literature    Share

"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    Share

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

Pound, Ezra on literature    Share

"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    Share

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

Renard, Jules on literature
3 fans of this quote    Share

"There can be no literary equivalent to truth."

Riding, Laura on literature    Share

"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    Share

"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    Share

"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    Share

"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    Share

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

Sartre, Jean-Paul on literature    Share

"Literature is the immortality of speech."

Schlegel, August Wilhelm Von on literature    Share

"Leisure without literature is death and burial alive."

Seneca on literature    Share

"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    Share

"Perversity is the muse of modern literature."

Sontag, Susan on literature    Share

"Remarks are not literature."

Stein, Gertrude on literature    Share

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

Stevens, Wallace on literature    Share

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

Stevens, Wallace on literature    Share

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

Stevens, Wallace on literature    Share

"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    Share

"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    Share

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

Trilling, Lionel on literature    Share

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

Tzara, Tristan on literature    Share

"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    Share

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

Wilde, Oscar on literature    Share

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

Wilde, Oscar on literature
3 fans of this quote    Share

But wait... There are more: prev 1, 2, 3, 4 next

Take a look at recent activity on QB!

 

Search Quotations Book