Literature Quotes

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

We are near awakening when we dream that we dream.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Literature is a splendid mistress, but a bad wife.

What does literature do for me? I think I solve problems in my writing. They may be my problems, but perhaps others share them, and in the process of working these through, I hope to entertain.

You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one without almost without bothering to read the other.

Literature is an easier way to study acting, because then you can take any kind of spin.

A foreign country can best be understood through its literature.

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.

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

Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures

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

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.

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.

Literature tells very little to those who understand it.

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.

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.

Truth is most beautiful undraped.

[I]t is well to have as many holds upon happiness as possible.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.

Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it's some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don't know nothin' but what we see.

It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.

In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.

A Wasn’t just isn't. He just isn't present. But you… You ARE YOU! And, now isn't that pleasant!

A perfect judge will read each word of wit with the same spirit that its author writ.

The literature of impotence is about to develop beyond measure.

Personal experience is the basis of all real literature.

Books do pretend ...but squeezed in between is even more that is true—without what you may call the lies, the pages would be too light for the truth, you see?

In the essence of truth lies deceit.

In a myriad of ways you tell one truth.

I imagined I was God for a millisecond And became speechless for a long time.

God is a cloud from which rain fell.

God is busy and has no time for you.

When following God, Zero we never find.

It is beautiful to express love and even more beautiful to feel it.

I visited many places, Some of them quite Exotic and far away, But I always returned to myself.

To come to nothing through something is the way to outside from both sides.

The night is still waiting.

Dream by making and make by dreaming.

Entering a cell, penetrating deep as a flying saucer to find a new galaxy would be an honorable task for a new scientist interested more in the inner state of the soul than in outer space.

Hope without love is hopeless.

About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.

Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.