Literature Quotes

Science fiction is the very literature of change.

Literature doesn't matter! The only thing that matters is money and getting your teeth fixed!

For someone who loves literature, and all books on principle, being asked to name three titles over a half century of serious reading is akin to asking one to recall their three favorite sunsets.

There is a vast difference between how things seem from the outside and how they feel on the inside.

The only people who have trouble with poetry are the people who link it with literature. It's much more akin to mountain-walking, and dancing by yourself at 2 A.M.

Our language and literature are without a doubt Britain's greatest contribution to the cultural heritage of the world.

Everything that is necessary is also easy. You just have to accept it. And the most necessary, the most natural matter on this planet is death.

It is easy to kill when you don't see your victim

Man may aspire to virtue, but he cannot reasonably aspire to truth.

I'm inspired by a lot of stuff. I always was interested in sculpture and painting and music and literature and all those things. There's no one thing.

Through engagement with others, literature lets us imagine what it would be like to be differe.

Science is like literature, a continuing dialog among diverse and conflicting voices, no one ever wholly right or wholly wrong, but a steady conversation forever provisional and personal and living.

Great questions make great reporting.

I don't think it's about entertainment. I think it's about being ourselves.

I take literature as a really serious human activity. It's not just a playful thing. It can be hilarious and wonderful and performative, but I think it's really serious.

I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.

Rekindled love is generally short-term.

Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures

The critic's hankering to be law-giver rather than servant of literature is irrepressible.

I was born in Washington State and have lived here for 42 plus years.

I do not know if she was virtuous, but she was ugly, and with a woman that is half the battle.

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.

Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary.

In Canada we have enough to do keeping up with two spoken languages ... so we just go right ahead and use English for literature, Scotch for sermons, and American for conversation.

I only keep books that I like very much. Otherwise I'd throw them out.

When I was six years old, my mother died; and then, for the first time, I learned, by the talk around me, that I was a slave.

I have friends who are writers, but we don't tend to talk about literature very much. It's just not part of my process; I tend to be pretty secretive about what I'm working on.

I'm never going to be in danger of getting the Nobel Prize for literature.

Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.

You can tell a man's taste in literature by his judgment in knowing what not to read.

A foreign country can best be understood through its literature.

We are near awakening when we dream that we dream.

My wife has a beastly habit of comparing poetry -- all literature in fact -- to the droppings of the goats among the rocks -- mere excreta that fertilises the ground it falls on.

The man whom God wills to slay in the struggle of life - he first individualizes.

I didn't make any money from my writing until much later. I published about 80 stories for nothing. I spent on literature.

Literature tells very little to those who understand it.

English literature is a flying fish.

I do not believe in guilt, moderation or dull pencils.

We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece.

I prefer unlucky things. Luck is vulgar. Who wants what luck would bring? I don't.

Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake.

Literature gives us the great gift of the present moment.

I love and care about literature, and great writers are our teachers. You're studying their mind when you read their work.

It matters little where a man may be at this moment; the point is whether he is growing.

The difficulty is not to write, but to write what you mean.

Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.

National literature does not mean much these days; now is the age of world literature, and every one must contribute to hasten thearrival of that age.

And so by the fifteenth century, on October 8, the Europeans were looking for a new place to try to get to, and they came up with a new concept: the West.

Literature, like a gypsy, to be picturesque, should be a little ragged.

I wish to share and pass down some of my generation's traits, and encourage young people to create their own art, music, and literature.