Literature Quotes

I saw literature as a fantasy, no less absorbing for all its irrelevance - a parallel life, as dreams shadow waking but never intersect it.

I think that literature quite often emerges from areas where there has been a lack of articulation, like women's writing.

I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature.

Now, drama is quite useful at helping us to understand what our position is and, conversely, we might then understand why our theatre is being destroyed

What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.

Violence is never a solution in my plays, just as ultimately violence is never a solution in human affairs.

Fifteen years ago I walked out of a production of one of my plays at the RSC because I decided it was a waste of time.

The one overall structure in my plays is language

The ancients understood the regulation of power better than the regulation of liberty.

A lot of my love of literature comes from Oz and Alice.

There's always some place to go. You don't need workshops, you don't need friends necessarily, you can be befriended by literature itself.

I think the deepest thing is that many fiction writers tell stories but are not elegant writers. But, we're not writing journalism when we're making literature.

Wishing of all employments is the worst

Procrastination is the thief of time: Year after year it steals, till all are fled.

The weak have remedies, the wise have joys; superior wisdom is superior bliss.

A man of pleasure is a man of pains.

They only babble who practise not reflection

Conscience allows us to do two things: Pass judgment on ourselves; approve or condemn our own conduct.

God will finish what He authors, but He is not obligated to finish what He has not authored.

Truth is life's most precious commodity.

You don't reward reaction; you reward results.

Men tend to feel threatened; women tend to feel guilty.

You cannot be responsible for salvation until first you've been responsible for sin.

As if one could know the good a person is capable of, when one doesn't know the bad he might do.

Someone who always has to lie discovers that every one of his lies is true

One should use praise to recognize what one is not.

[Shirat ha-Yam ] is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, pieces of Biblical literature that we possess. It is much closer to history than later traditions of the Exodus.

When I say it doesn't make much difference, I mean in terms of the importance of the piece of literature.

In Talmudic literature, certainly in the beginning, he was like a human being - except he was a serpent. But he was talking and walking and probably dreaming.

I attempt to write a good novel. Whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe.

Am I worried people will say I'm repeating myself? Sure. One thought I had was to publish it as a novel but eventually I just decided to do what I wanted to do.

to be honest and yet popular is almost as difficult in literature as it is in life.

... to be "literary" appeared to my deluded innocence as an unending romance.

I was reading everything under the sun from music history to feminist literature to Shakespeare, which is why I'm not a complete idiot at this time.

I have a huge passion for literature.

Facts are counterrevolutionary.

There is sublime thieving in all giving. Someone gives us all he has and we are his.

That's true of every form of literature - each writer brings new things to it because each of us is an individual.

A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.

Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art.

Literature wasn't intended to be about perfect people, it was about flaws, very real and very deep human flaws.

For some of us, watching a miniseries that lasts longer than most marriages is not easy.

I never liked to hunt, you know. There was always the danger of having a horse fall on you.

The most appealing part is the feeling of learning something true - the pleasure of a truth. For me, that's mostly found in philosophical literature at the moment.

Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe.

As for literature It gives no man a sinecure. And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy, There's nothing in it.

I have a vision of artists putting into film, drama, literature, music, and paintings great themes and great characters from the Book of Mormon.

Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society.

True literature should rouse the reader, unsettle him, change his view of the world, give him a resolute push over the cliff of self-knowledge

America slept because most Americans preferred it that way.