Literature Quotes

He valued life and literature equally for the light they threw upon each other; to his mind one implied the other; he was unable to conceive of them apart.

Literature is so common a luxury that the age has grown fastidious.

The Bible stands alone in human literature in its elevated conception of manhood, in character and conduct.

Morality, as has often been pointed out, is antecedent to religion-it even exists in a rudimentary form among animals.

To be called one thing, is oftentimes to be another.

There is sorrow in the world, but goodness too; and goodness that is not greenness, either, no more than sorrow is.

There is all of the difference in the world between paying and being paid.

The American, who up to the present day, has evinced, in Literature, the largest brain with the largest heart, that man is Nathaniel Hawthorne.

It is not the purpose of literature to purvey news. For news consult the Almanac de Gotha.

Of all human events, perhaps, the publication of a first volume of verses is the most insignificant; but though a matter of no moment to the world, it is still of some concern to the author.

My two sons speak Hebrew, and are familiar with the scriptures and with rabbinic literature. This is the way we live.

In my work, I attempt to deal with the Bible as I would deal with any work of literature.

Giving is good, but taking is bad and brings death.

Alas, two men are often necessary to provide a woman with a perfect lover, just as in literature a writer composes a type only by employing the singularities of several similar characters.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years at least.

The spirit world doesn't admit to communicating with me, so it's fairly even.

When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.

Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.

History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.

The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There's a vast literature of outstanding writing on the subject.

I'm sorry to say that far worse things have happened and the literature of the Holocaust is a witness to the capacity of the novel as a form.

Sigmund Freud was a half baked Viennese quack. Our literature, culture, and the films of Woody Allen would be better today if Freud had never written a word.

Literature is the best way to overcome death.

Socrates wrote nothing. Christ wrote nothing.

I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.

Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is.

The message of guidance that neither politics nor philosophy nor religion now seems able to provide, we look for in modern literature.

I never show anything to anybody until I've finished it

A writer is a human being. He has to live with a sense of honor.

I reach my readers regardless of what the critics have written

All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one.

Curiously, the United States is full of writers who have one big work in their life and that's all.

Writing is finally play, and there's no reason why you should get paid for playing

The writer works in a lonely way.

Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form

In Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he's about 75

Isaac Singer was born in Poland and doesn't write in English. Still, he's an American.

My attitudes have changed, but somebody would have to read all my books to find out how they have

You have to expect the raps when you have achieved popularity as a writer

[Social] science fiction is that branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance on human beings.

When you tell a story in the kitchen to a friend, it's full of mistakes and repetitions. It's good to avoid that in literature, but still, a story should feel like a conversation. It's not a lecture.

I don't think of literature as an end in itself. It's just a way of communicating something.

My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it.

People never believe you.

It is the life in literature that acts upon life.

I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.

I grew up to be indifferent to the distinction between literature and science, which in my teens were simply two languages for experience that I learned together.

The cinema, as literature, as all the plastic arts, do not exist outside of a critical system that allows us to study them.