Literature Quotes

You can count on Scandinavian literature for a certain kind of darkness, a modern mythic style.

Read nature; nature is a friend to truth.

There's always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance.

The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.

I initially studied literature [in France], and then I went to cinema school. I discovered the Cinematheque, and saw not only action movies and westerns, but also lots of serious movies.

Those whom we can love, we can hate; to others we are indifferent.

It's such a Bore Being always Poor.

It doesn't serve an American interest. It really doesn't really serve Israeli interests - it serves the interests of the political party that's getting the votes of the settlers on the West Bank.

I got the Weary Blues And I can't be satisfied.

My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs.

But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work

It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.

Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.

Often with good sentiments we produce bad literature.

True, Heaven prohibits certain pleasures; but one can generally negotiate a compromise.

...a nation could change its way of life, its history, its technology, its art, literature, and culture, but it would never have a real chance to change its gestures.

I don't know why his lawyers didn't tell him, 'You don't have to answer any questions about your private life, Mr. President. Let them sue you. Take the heat. You don't have to answer.'

I'm not terribly happy about rock and roll. Certain rock music is uninspiring, numbing; it makes you feel like an idiot.

Then the administration tied it in to the regional dispute between Israel and its enemies, as if that's about international terrorism. No, it's not.

It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.

You don't know whether he's thought through how this is going to affect the Middle East.

I have written every one of my novels to convince somebody of something.

The duty of literature is to note what counts, and to light up what is suited to the light. If it ceases to choose and to love, it becomes like a woman who gives herself without preference.

I hate everything which is not in myself.

Intimate relationships are a gold mine for literature to explore, to understand, to describe.

I ought not to speak about the dead because the dead are all over the place.

You can plan to be brave - it's even better if you just try to be brave.

Beckett had an unerring light on things, which I much appreciated.

When I read it ["Tough Guys Don't Dance"], I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.

One handles truths like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a giant deception, treachery. All writers have concealed more than they revealed.

The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.

It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing.

As threshing separates the wheat from the chaff, so does affliction purify virtue.

Literature is both my joy and my comfort: it can add to every happiness and there is no sorrow it cannot console.

Taste is to literature what bon ton is in society.

Do not gain basely; base gain is equal to ruin.

Wine has lit up for me the pages of literature, and revealed in life romance lurking in the commonplace.

The present age has seen a great slump in humanist values.

Yet humanitarianism is not a purely Christian movement any more than it is a purely humanist one

I hate brandy...it stinks of modern literature.

How easily some light report is set about, but how difficult to bear.

The gift of literature is that, in some lucky cases, reading a novel or a story makes the reader more curious, more open-minded.

My one aim and concentrated purpose shall be and is to show that women can learn, can reason, can compete with men in the grand fields of literature and science . . .

Bigot: One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.

How far the existence of the Academy has influenced French literature, either for good or for evil, is an extremely dubious question.

I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.

In pure literature, the writers of the eighteenth century achieved, indeed, many triumphs; but their great, their peculiar, triumphs were in the domain of thought.

NOVEL, n. A short story padded.

If you can afford to advertise, you don't need to.

Try to take for a mate a person of your own neighborhood.