Literature Quotes

Cubism is ... a picture for its own sake. Literary Cubism does the same thing in literature, using reality merely as a means and not as an end.

Literature and film have a way of lifting you from your own existence and transporting you to some foreign place and putting you in the shoes with an experience different than your own.

To deaden yourself against any hurt is to deaden yourself also against the hurt of others.

Photography's about the surface, what's happening at the top of the sea. Literature's about all the stuff below.

I think it is an important question of our lives - what is the meaning of literature to us as humans.

When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature.

Literature is a microscope; it shows us the unseen!

Winning Nobel imposed on me a lifestyle to which I am not used and which I would not have preferred.

Do you know-I hardly remembered you? Hardly remembered me? I mean: how shall I explain? I-it's always so. Each time you happen to me all over again.

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.

How much of our literature, our political life, our friendships and love affairs, depend on being able to talk peacefully in a bar!

Without literature my life would be miserable.

Literature must spring from the deep and submerged humus of our life.

He tries to find the exit from himself but there is no door.

Writers are engineers of human souls.

Don’t pay attention to those who offer too much.

It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves

You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.

Statesmen are grocers, ambitious clowns.

For a game, you don’t need a teacher.

A smiling lie is a whirlwind, easy to enter, but hard to escape.

Even if you are alone you wage war with yourself.

Everybody talks, but there is no conversation.

There can be no forced inspiration.

...with each new book of mine I have always the feeling that this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature.

Every star was once darker than the night, before it awoke.

You mark and celebrate errors, transforming failures into successes.

Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.

My mathematics is simple: one plus one = one.

You're only as sick as your secrets.

I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time.

The rich don't have to kill to eat. They employ people, as they call it. The rich don't do evil themselves. They pay. People do all they can to please them, and everybody's happy.

Don't you forget what's divine in the Russian soul and that's resignation.

You've got to love libraries. You've got to love books. You've got to love poetry. You've got to love everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it.

Isn't the greatest rule of all the rules simply to please?

The past is but the past of a beginning.

Actors are the jockeys of literature. Others supply the horses, the plays, and we simply make them run.

I study English literature but my friends are doing psychology and things like that. No one cares about acting there. It's not competitive and it's a nice environment for me.

In communist Russia, their major organ was Pravda, which means "truth." The Russians knew how to read between the lines. They didn't take their literature literally.

Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their way to Literature.

You can believe in originals only if you just don't know their context within literature. Certainly I believe in originality, but it lies with the teller, not the tale.

It is the glorious doom of literature that the evil perishes and the good remains.

In science, address the few, in literature the many. In science, the few must dictate opinion to the many; in literature, the many, sooner or later, force their judgement on the few.

War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.

I don't how I can describe the quality that is only found in art (be it music, literature, painting, or whatever), this quality, it's just there, and it endures.

Literature got me into this mess and literature is going to have to get me out of it.

What I try to do in a play is put a problem on stage, head-on, without evasion.

Sometimes I want to have a mental book burning that would scour my mind clean of all the filthy visions literature has conjured there. But how to do without 'The Illiad?' How to do without 'Macbeth?

The thing we fear we bring to pass.

The greatest books in Russian literature are satires. Gogol's Dead Souls, for example, is a very over-the-top satire about life in Russia. I think it's the thing we do best.