Literature Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Kafka: cries of helplessness in twenty powerful volumes.

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

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

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

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.

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

Literature ... is the rediscovery of childhood.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

It appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel.

When you deal with your brother, be pleasant, but get a witness.

Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly, there is nothing left but quietism - robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it.

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

The curse of Scottish literature is the lack of a whole language, which finally means the lack of a whole mind.

What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best.

Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

Sabbath - a weekly festival having its origin in the fact that God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.

Take the time to discover how African-Americans have had a great impact on this country. In science, education, literature, art, and politics.

Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace.

All literature up to today is sexist. The Muses never sang to the poets about liberated women. It's the same old chanson from the Bible and Homer through Joyce and Proust.

I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.

Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don't believe it of any other sport but their own.

I'm interested in pressure, I'm interested in duress. All the great works of art, or film or literature, in my opinion, have elements of those in them.

Justice requires that everyone should have enough to eat. But it also requires that everyone should contribute to the production of food.

The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.

Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.

The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.

The proper study of Mankind is Man.

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.

The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.

A louse in the locks of literature.

We idolized the Beatles, except for those of us who idolized the Rolling Stones, who in those days still had many of their original teeth.

We cannot attribute to fortune or virtue that which is achieved without either.

I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.

He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.