Literature Quotes

The true artist doesn't substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser one.

Temptation to behave is terrible.

The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution, but thet are everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought

It’s one thing if everyone wears the same shoes or drinks the same soda. But the world of literature is the last place in which globalization should mean homogeneity.

Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honors or of wealth.

My favorite thing is still journalism. I'm almost 50. This has been my life ever since I was in college.

There is nothing more imprudent than excessive prudence.

Even more important maybe, or equally more important at least, is they don't have to scrap for a living.

The world dies over and over again, but the skeleton always gets up and walks.

Ideology has shaped the very sofa on which I sit.

Consciousness is our only reprieve from Time.

When you kill somebody in the movies, it matters, whereas in literature it can be allegorical.

Although I myself don't go to church or synagogue, I do, whether it's superstition or whatever, pray every time I get on a plane. I just automatically do it. I say the same thing every time.

Know how to behave at a fine restaurant, which is a telltale measure of social maturity.

It is a comfortable feeling to know that you stand on your own ground. Land is about the only thing that can't fly away.

High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.

Look for joy in your life; it's not always easy to find.

People who have fabulous childhoods have this sense that nothing is ever going to be that good again. With me, I have the sense that nothing is going to be that bad.

When a man is ill nothing is so important to him as his own illness.

I remember being in the public library and my jaw just aching as I looked around at all those books I wanted to read. There just wasn't time enough to read everything I wanted to read.

If you have an anecdote from one source, you file it away. If you hear it again, it may be true. Then the more times you hear it the less likely it is to be true.

My body has certainly wandered a good deal, but I have an uneasy suspicion that my mind has not wandered enough.

Someday I suspect, when Jesus has definitely got me for a sunbeam, my works may be adequately assessed.

In Jefferson's mind democracy was tantamount to extreme individualism.

The popular will cannot be taken for granted, it must be created.

With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.

I'll go through life either first class or third, but never in second.

I need to write to be happy.

One of my greatest pleasures is falling into a story someone else has written.

Scientists and creationists are always at odds, of course.

I know of no better name than Anarchism.

My stories are never quite good enough

I've always enjoyed studying the small clues that indicate a particular class level.

The great mass of humanity should never learn to read or write.

My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.

I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.

In such misfortunes my Mother was of an heroic spirit, in suffering patiently when there was no remedy, and being industrious where she thought she could help.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us.

True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.

Exciting literature after supper is not the best digestive.

If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.

The world doesn't need any more mediocrity or hedged bets.

Perhaps it is impossible for a person who does no good to do no harm.

Men who pass most comfortably through this world are those who possess good digestions and hard hearts.

It was Nietzsche who first made us conscious of the significance of the individual as a term in the evolutionary process-in that part of the evolutionary process which has still to take place.

If the individual is a unit in a corporate mass, his life is not merely brutish and short, but dull and mechanical.

Be able to recognize when you're reading or hearing material biased to your own side.

Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?