Literature Quotes

There is no body of ancient literature in the world which enjoys such a wealth of good textual attestation as the New Testament.

Of all ghosts the ghosts of our old loves are the worst.

When a man can observe himself suffering and is able, later, to describe what he's gone through, it means he was born for literature.

To be hated cordially, is only a left-handed compliment.

For me, baseball is the most nourishing game outside of literature. They both are re-tellings of human experience.

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.

Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.

The study of social progress is to-day not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.

Reverence is fatal to literature.

We shall perish by guile just as we slew.

Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.

Slow but steady wins the race.

Only as far as a man is happily married to himself is he fit for married life and family life in general.

Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

Have you ever noticed that when you must struggle to hear something, you close your eyes?

Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.

The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.

All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.

Too often, feelings arrive too soon, waiting for thoughts that often come too late.

My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.

Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

To risk life to save a smile on a face of a woman or a child is the secret of chivalry.

Everything that looks too perfect is too perfect to be perfect.

Biography is one of the new terrors of death.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

Others may write from the head, but he writes from the heart, and the heart will always understand him.

In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul

The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature -- a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.

Capital dictates the fate of humanity.

For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.

Artistic simplicity is more complex than artistic complexity for it arises via the simplification of the latter and against its backdrop or system.

Literature is the denunciation of the times in which one lives.

It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.

Literature may open a third eye in the middle of the reader's forehead.

As long as the state permits itself to interfere in the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere with the affairs of state.

There is nothing that compares to an unexpected round of applause.

Modesty is not only an ornament, but also a guard to virtue.

I try to teach my heart not to want things it cant have.

People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.

Praise undeserved, is satire in disguise.

If I need something, I'll invent it.

At first, I only laughed at myself. Then I noticed that life itself is amusing. I've been in a generally good mood ever since.

Self-portraits have been done in painting, but never in music or literature. It has no meaning, it makes no sense. And in movies I was wondering if it could. And how.

Writing for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life

The whole mad swirl of everything that was to come began then.

The present time has one advantage over every other -- it is our own.

Good manners are appreciated as much as bad manners are abhorred.

All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.