Quotes about literature

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Literature is the immortality of speech.

— August Wilhelm Von Schlegel

Leisure without literature is death and burial alive.

— Seneca

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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.

— Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Perversity is the muse of modern literature.

— Susan Sontag

Remarks are not literature.

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Wallace Stevens

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

— Wallace Stevens

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

— Wallace Stevens

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.

— Alexis De Tocqueville

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.

— Tatyana Tolstaya

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.

— Lionel Trilling

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.

— Lionel Trilling

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

— Lionel Trilling

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

— Tristan Tzara

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.

— Edith Wharton

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.

— Oscar Wilde

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

— Thornton Wilder

Professors of literature, who for the most part are genteel but mediocre men, can make but a poor defense of their profession, and the professors of science, who are frequently men of great intelligence but of limited interests and education

— Yvor Winters

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

— Virginia Woolf

Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that

— Virginia Woolf

How does one say something new and not retell?

— Dejan Stojanovic

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.

— Vaclav Havel