Literature Quotes

Unlike sciences, literature as art relies on societal acceptance of a certain vocabulary.

When I was at school, I was terrible at algebra and arithmetic, but I was always the best at English and literature. And acting, of course.

I like literature that you respond to in some way. You laugh, you cry, you turn the light on - that's great, it's eliciting a response by proxy.

I was a literature major in college and that was my thing, books.

The little man is still a man.

We don't get to know people when they come to us; we must go to them to find out what they are like.

Literature is a fragment of a fragment. Of all that ever happened, or has been said, but a fraction has been written; and of this but little is extant.

Deeply earnest and thoughtful people stand on shaky footing with the public.

During half a century of literary work, I have endeavoured to introduce the philosophy of evolution into the sphere of literature, and to inspire my readers to think in evolutionary terms.

It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.

A curious thing about written literature: It is about four thousand years old, but we have no way of knowing whether four thousand years constitutes senility or the maiden blush of youth.

The returns we read about in the industry sales literature vastly diminish when we move from the theoretical world of market indexes to the real world of actually investing.

Literature is a mystical place for me. It's not dry. It's where miracles happen.

Shakespeare wouldn't have been any good if he'd stayed in Stratford. He had to go to London to be bathed in the full current of the Renaissance.

It is commonly asserted and accepted that Paradise Lost is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement in our literature.

Either be wholly slaves or wholly free.

Poetry surprises us with what we already know.

[Alfred] Hitchcock was very interested in the image on the screen.As is any good cinema director. That is the language they speak. It is not literature, it is images on screen.

For me, the measure of a poem is the word, not the line.

I detest literature. I abominate the theatre. I have a horror of culture. I am only interested in magic!

States of soul rightly expressed, as the poet expresses them in moments of pure inspiration, retain forever the power of creating like states. It is this that makes genuine literature a vital force.

America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember.

I've always had difficulties with female characters.

I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.

The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.

Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.

More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.

Americans believe that if you know something, you should do something about it.

The longing we have to communicate cleanly and directly with people is always obstructed by qualifications and often with concern about how our messages will be received.

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

To do your own work well, whether it be for life or death.

Ever'body's askin' that. "What we comin' to?" Seems to me we don't never come to nothin'. Always on the way.

I think today if we forbade our illiterate children to touch the wonderful things of our literature, perhaps they might steal them and find secret joy.

The literature of science is filled with answers found when the question propounded had an entirely different direction and end.

Critics are the eunuchs of literature. They stand by in envious awe while the whole man and his partner demonstrate the art of living.

I love to read about anger. A "feel bad" book always makes me feel good. And no other novel in the history of literature is more depressing than Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children.

The science fiction I write comes from a pretty deep pool of literature, not just from the reflection of other science fiction films, and I think that gives me somewhat deeper roots.

Literature was the only religion her father practiced, when a book fell on the floor he kissed it, when he was done with a book he tried to give it away to someone who would love it.

Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life.

For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.

All literature, is, finally autobiographical.

I've always said that music is like literature.

The woman that deliberates is lost.

In poetic thought, the role of the subconscious is played by euphony.

National literature begins with fables and ends with novels.

One man finds in religion his literature and his science, another finds in it his joy and his duty.

Rhetoric takes no real account of the art in literature and morality takes no account of the art in life.

I don't think that any 'ism' is higher than literature or art. So I'm a formalist. I greatly honor and respect the form of a work.

The greatest works of literature seem to embody both "art" and "morality".

I think it's restrictive to typecast myself as a novelist because I enjoy other forms of expression. I love literature and I love cinema.