Literature Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

I have a passion for ballad. . . . They are the gypsy children of song, born under green hedgerows in the leafy lanes and bypaths of literature,--in the genial Summertime.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

Real worth requires no interpreter: its everyday deeds form its emblem.

Having achieved and accomplished love, then the man passes into the unknown. He has become himself, his tale is told.

What fascinated me mostly about Mickey Cohen was that he, in his later years, hired someone to help him to comprehend literature, to help him to read better, to understand words better.

Originality in literature is only a new coat of paint on an old house.

There is a form of literature that is a deed, and a form that is only talk, and the latter passes away like a conversation.

I think the world is full of evil people. I think in some ways we're in more danger now than before.

I credit literature for the reason I act because that was the door to me saying, ‘Oh! I can be somebody else. I can exist as someone else.’

If women be educated for dependence; that is, to act according to the will of another fallible being, and submit, right or wrong, to power, where are we to stop?

A fanatic is a nut who has something to believe in.

When an American heiress wants to buy a man, she at once crosses the Atlantic. The only really materialistic people I have ever met have been Europeans.

I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.

I can't really define it in sexual terms alone although our sexuality is so energizing why not enjoy it too?

Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.

The Nobel Prize has given me, for the first time in my life, the feeling that my literature could be appreciated on an international level.

I've not seen in my lifetime any politician who is a heroic figure. The manipulation that all politicians use on one level or another is so transparent.

A politician's goal is always to manipulate public debate. I think there are some politicians with higher goals. But all of them get corrupted by power.

The only reason I would write a sequel is if I were struck by an idea that I felt to be equal to the original. Too many sequels diminish the original.

We are passing through a very sensitive time, and on the whole, this country is facing very big problems.

Nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person.

Fidelity to conscience is inconsistent with retiring modesty. If it be so, let the modesty succumb. It can be only a false modesty which can be thus endangered.

While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.

I ain't a bit ashamed of anything.

The blood of Jesus Christ can cover a multitude of sins, it seems to me.

They who do not understand that a man may be brought to hope that which of all things is the most grievous to him, have not observed with sufficient closeness the perversity of the human mind.

The possibility of divorce renders both marriage partners stricter in their observance of the duties they owe to each other. Divorces help to improve morals and to increase the population.

Oxford is the most dangerous place to which a young man can be sent.

Delicacy - a sad, sad false delicacy - robs literature of the two best things among its belongings: Family-circle narratives & obscene stories.

The literature of the world has exerted its power by being translated.

I need to be frightened of things. I hate it, but I must need it, because it's what I do.

I thought they would never select an Eastern writer for the Nobel. I was surprised.

Are wars anything but the means whereby a nation is nourished, whereby it is strengthened, whereby it is buttressed?

I made a compact with myself that in my person literature should stand by itself, of itself, and for itself.

When millions applaud you seriously ask yourself what harm you have done; and when they disapprove you, what good.

Evil is only good perverted.

The greatest firmness is the greatest mercy.

personally I don't trust literature that soothes people's consciences.

Philosophy appears to concern itself only with the truth, but perhaps expresses only fantasies, while literature appears to concern itself only with fantasies, but perhaps it expresses the truth.

When an actor has money he doesn't send letters, he sends telegrams.

All literature is an effort at the formal character of the epigram.

In my head there is a whole army of people asking to be let out and waiting for the word of command.

In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act.