Literature Quotes

I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.

One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life.

London is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other.

Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement.

News events cannot be controlled, nor can newscasts be mapped out like entertainment shows.

When for so long you can't get a job for reasons that seem specious, you you finally do have it, you are constantly afraid of losing it.

I hadn't realized until I covered the police beat just how seedy crime is.

Walking into a room filled with people you don't know but who know you brings out your worst vulnerabilities.

I don't know what psychotherapy does. I have been seeing the same person for 26 years now.

Writing as a woman presents enormous problems but I have attempted it several times and haven't had many complaints.

I'm not rational enough to be a good journalist.

No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.

Upon the creatures we have made, we are, ourselves, at last, dependent.

Some men are like nails, very easily drawn; others however are more like rivets never drawn at all.

Literature is an investment of genius which pays dividends to all subsequent times.

The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school life because of the great importance attaching to literature seems to be a perversion.

Great wits are sure to madness near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide.

Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles; and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.

Politics are vulgar when they are not liberalised by history, and history fades into mere literature when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics.

Large fortunes are all founded either on the occupation of land, or lending or the taxation of labor.

I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.

Comics? Honestly, that's more a matter of nostalgia for me. I think most of that energy has gone to my love of literature, and my love of film...

What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not do we are told expressly.

Observation is an old man's memory.

There is not a more unhappy being than a superannuated idol.

Among all kinds of Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel.

Mere bashfulness without merit is awkwardness.

To be perfectly just is an attribute of the divine nature; to be so to the utmost of our abilities, is the glory of man.

The chief ingredients in the composition of those qualities that gain esteem and praise, are good nature, truth, good sense, and good breeding.

The most violent appetites in all creatures are lust and hunger; the first is a perpetual call upon them to propagate their kind, the latter to preserve themselves.

Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.

I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it.

Children now expect their parents to audition for approval.

If grass were legalized, it would help our drug problem enormously.

Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing.

It was not possible to broadcast any of that because of an agreement between Jackson and the family [of the child]. Our legal advice was that we could not broadcast it.

I never saw anything that would qualify as a criminal activity.

Then again, they're not scripted and I feel it's virtually impossible to be anything but yourself when you're in front of the cameras and cooking so there is a measure of truth in what you see.

This was almost two hours of factual documentary. In our audience ratings, barely no one left the programme. The whole of his life is so fascinating and people kept watching for that reason.

At some stages of your life you will deal with things and at others you are overwhelmed with misery and anxiety.

the whole purport of literature...is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.

Tricker the Squirrel is the best piece I ever wrote. It's intricate.

In fact a favourite problem of Tyndall is-Given the molecular forces in a mutton chop, deduce Hamlet or Faust therefrom. He is confident that the Physics of the Future will solve this easily.

It is not my mode of thought that has caused my misfortunes, but the mode of thought of others.

The freedom to be an individual is the essence of America.

There's no shortage of female role models. They're everywhere - in history, in literature, in the news. Just look around.