Literature Quotes
Casanova, he had no money and no power, and according to some, he even was cute. But he had talent to live, and some literature talent. I love how he invented himself.
When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.
Poetry lies at the centre of the literary experience because it is the form that most clearly asserts the specificity of literature.
While you're writing, you can't concentrate nearly as well on what the speaker is saying.
It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.
Committees have become so important nowadays that subcommittees have to be appointed to do the work.
Many speak the truth when they say that they despise riches, but they mean the riches possessed by others.
I learned a lot of things about literature talking to people at the publishing company. Did you know that about 90 percent of celebrity autobiographies are ghostwritten?
The only reward to be expected from literature is contempt if one fails and hatred if one succeeds.
To know that the Bible is the literature of a barbarous people, to know that it is uninspired, to be certain that the supernatural does not and cannot exist - all this is but the beginning of wisdom.
To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.
That writer does the most who gives his reader the most knowledge and takes from him the least time.
I hated myself and the world because I had failed to face and accept the limitations of my self and of life. In literature this refusal is called romanticism; in psychology, neurosis.
Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.
Published memoirs indicate the end of a man's activity, and that he acknowledges the end.
I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath.
Those who appreciate the ways of simple tribes, where every activity is direct and immediately understandable, are able to live among them.
It is ever the invisible that is the object of our profoundest worship. With the lover it is not the seen but the unseen that he muses upon.
Religion is absolutely unfathomable. Always and everywhere one can dig more deeply into infinities.
We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.
There are three modes of bearing the ills of life; by indifference, which is the most common; by philosophy, which is the most ostentatious; and by religion, which is the most effectual.
Literature must become party literature. Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat.
Even the nonreligious may exercise aesthetic judgment in matters of religion, and indeed our age has given the unbelieving a sophisticated taste in religious literature.
The wider the author's arsenal of tools and the better technically equipped the storyteller is, the better the tale will be.
SF is the literature of the theoretically possible, and F is the literature of the impossible.
Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.
The beginning of self-knowledge: recognizing that your motives are the same as other people's.
