Literature Quotes

Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.

In London, before I set out, I had paid one shilling; another was now demanded, so that upon the whole, from London to Richmond, the passage in the stage costs just two shillings.

Pain is essential. Often I cannot avoid it.Therefore all one can do is redeem it; and the only way to redeem it is through literature, art, poetry, music.

I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.

Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.

The story [Henny-Penny] has the best opening in all literature-"The sky is falling," cried Henny-Penny, "and a piece of it fell on my tail.

A grouch escapes so many little annoyances that it almost pays to be one.

The masses are still ungrateful or ignorant. They prefer murder, poisonings, and crimes generally to a literature possessed of style and feeling.

A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.

...Don't let me ever hear you say, 'I can't read fiction. I only have time for the truth.' Fiction is the truth, fool! Ever hear of 'literature'? That means fiction, too, stupid.

Journalists write because they have nothing to say, and have something to say because they write.

Pessimist: One who has been intimately acquainted with an Optimist.

Take the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or beauty or form, we are borrowers.

He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.

It's the good loser who finally loses out.

There is nothing in this world constant, but inconstancy.

I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.

There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake.

Extol Jewish virtue, modern Zionism and the Israeli Defense Forces.

Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.

Saturday Night Live is hitting me on a regular basis again. This is my fourth decade that I've been lampooned on Saturday Night Live

Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author's soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted.

One never knows whether people have principles on principle or whether for their own personal satisfaction.

I suffer from the curse of being multi-talented. There's no doubt about it. Politics and literature have gotten in the way of songwriting.

One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.

Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness; he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt.

Someone — Cyril Connolly? Ezra Pound? — once said that anything that can be read twice is literature; I would say that anything that bears saying twice is quotable.

Oh, I wish I were a miser; being a miser must be so occupying.

It is so friendly so simply friendly and though inevitable not a sadness and though occurring not a shock.

Remarks are not literature.

There is no real reality to a really imagined life any more.

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

The phrase I like to use to describe my sense of time-a play on comparative literature - is comparative time.

He's arm'd without that's innocent within; Be this thy Screen, and this thy Wall of Brass.

If one discards the Bible as being unreliable, then he must discard almost all literature of antiquity.

Jesus claimed He had the power to raise himself from the dead and His followers would be raised from the dead. That's a unique claim in the literature of religion.

Disillusionment in living is finding that no one can really ever be agreeing with you completely in anything.

We are always doing something for posterity, but I would fain see posterity do something for us.

It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.

Life is lived on levels and arrived at in stages.

There is nothing like literature: I lose a cow, I write about her death, and my writing pays me enough to buy another cow.

Trust funds can never be a substitute for a fund of trust.

I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to do to get rich.

Don't ask to live in tranquil times. Literature doesn't grow there.

What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature?

Wherever we direct our attention to Hindu literature the notion of infinity presents itself.

I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.

Writer's make national literature, while translators make universal literature.

The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own.

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.