Literature Quotes

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

There are a handful of people whom money won't spoil, and we all count ourselves among them.

Every man has his dignity. I'm willing to forget mine, but at my own discretion and not when someone else tells me to.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

I have found people don't want to be told. That they can figure it out.

If the world would apologize, I might consider a reconciliation.

One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages.

There is something wrong about being photographed that has nothing to do with vanity.

Literature ... is the rediscovery of childhood.

France may claim the happiest marriages in the world, but the happiest divorces in the world are 'made in America.'

One of my major preoccupations is the approximation between what I say and what I do, between what I seem to be and what I am actually becoming.

The modern state no longer has anything but rights; it does not recognize duties any more.

I'm always looking, and I'm always asking questions.

In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.

Kafka: cries of helplessness in twenty powerful volumes.

The Lord grant we may all be tillers of the soil.

Be able to notice all the confusion between fact and opinion that appears in the news

You must consider the bottom line, but make it integrity before profits.

So our student will flit like a busy bee through the entire garden of literature, light on every blossom, collect a little nectar from each, and carry it to his hive.

Be able to meet any deadline, even if your work is done less well than it would be if you had all the time you would have preferred.

More than art, more than literature, music is universally accessible.

Be able to live alone, even if you don't want to and think you will never find it necessary.

Modesty, tis a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.

Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.

If your faith is opposed to experience, to human learning and investigation, it is not worth the breath used in giving it expression.

Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man.

One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease.

What I do deny is that you can build any enduring society without some such mystical ethos.

We have to hate our immediate predecessors, to get free from their authority.

I and life: The case was settled chivalrously. The opponents parted without having made up.

We live at the edge of the miraculous.

I love the early process of asking questions about a story and deciding which questions matter most.

A blunt statement can be as false as any other.

The only test of work of literature is that it shall please other ages than its own.

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave

Lotsa people want to hurt me. That's the price you pay for being a big mouth.

that sunlight of the dead which is called literature.

The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.

Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review.

I hold that gentleman to be the best-dressed whose dress no one observes.

It is possible to interpret without observing, but not to observe without interpreting.

Invention is the talent of youth, as judgment is of age.

The first forms of writing emerged not for art, literature, or love, not for spiritual or liturgical purposes, but for business--all literature could be said to originate from sales receipts (sorry).

The best way to make a silk purse from a sow's ear is to begin with a silk sow. The same is true of money.

Decreased business base increases overhead. So does increased business base.

Without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer.

In France one must adapt oneself to the fragrance of a urinal.

I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.

I never guess. It is a shocking habit destructive to the logical faculty.

Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life.