Literature Quotes

If you start to think of your physical and moral condition, you usually find that you are sick.

As much pleasure as young people get from Twittering and texting, there is no way these activities will nourish their minds and spirits the way literature can.

There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves.

Over the years, I've trained myself to speak using the same language I would use if I were typing: meaning using full sentences in the way that paragraphs and scenes are arranged.

In the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get, the easier the sinking.

I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature.

Tardiness often robs us opportunity, and the dispatch of our forces.

Mathematics is no more computation than typing is literature.

One does not set fire to a world which is already lost

There seems to be this sense among even well-meaning Americans that Africa is this black hole of murder and mutilation that can never be fixed, no matter what aid is brought in.

My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.

Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.

Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.

There are not that many new media brands you can say that about nowadays.

It is our best work that God wants, not the dregs of our exhaustion. I think he must prefer quality to quantity.

I was once a student in a punk T-Shirt hooked on screwed-up scenarios. Thats how I became the esteemed cultural figure that I am today.

You are no better than you should be.

So often, literature about African people is conflated with literature about African politics, as if the state were somehow of greater import or interest than the individual.

Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in mystery, we shall learn nothing.

A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identity he is continually informing and filling some other body.

For many, immaturity is an ideal, not a defect.

The Vedic literature opens to us a chapter in what has been called the education of the human race to which we can find no parallel anywhere else.

The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came.

I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.

I am only interested in bad taste if I can enjoy a gruesome tango or watch a movie that makes me cry.

Someone has said that life itself is a party: you join after it's started and you leave before it's finished.

One of the biggest problems in literature is the lack of subtlety.

Chance fights ever on the side of the prudent.

The life of a man who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes a business speculation; his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital.

Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.

To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.

Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.

Every novel is a debtor to Homer.

Money is a handmaiden, if thou knowest how to use it A mistress, if thou knowest not.

People who are strangers to liquor are incapable of talking about literature.

If the public likes you, you're good. Shakespeare was a common, down-to-earth writer in his day.

We can look high or we can look low in books or in journals, but the result is the same. The scientific literature has no answers to the question of the origin of the immune system.

The pattern of the prodigal is: rebellion, ruin, repentance, reconciliation, restoration.

Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.

One of the most important things to remember about infant care is: don't change diapers in midstream.

Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides.

All literature, all philosophical treatises, all the voices of antiquity are full of examples for imitation, which would all lie unseen in darkness without the light of literature.

Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.

Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

The ravaged face in the mirror hides the enchanting youth that is the real me.

As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.

Only the ideas that we really live have any value.

I really think music and movement - dance, you know - and literature inform my visuals. I think film is also based in dance. The relationship between me, the camera and the actor is always a dance.