Literature Quotes

We go to literature because it shows us some set of humane values. It is showing us how to live.

each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.

How very dull our lives would be without literature! How very much dark and poor, how so sad and empty the world would be!

If you haven't read Shakespeare's Hamlet yet, it means that you haven't reached the summit of the literature yet!

In the garden of literature, the highest and the most charismatic flowers are always the quotations.

We have invented the literature because the reality wasn't imaginative enough and we also wanted to be alone, at least for a while!

They are focused on whether they can do something. They never think whether they should do something.

Whatever Kurt Vonnegut's ultimate status will be in the annals of literature, he was important to a lot of people right now. That's what most writers really care about.

I have been aspiring to write some sort of literature for a long time.

Imagine this guy hits Mike Hammer over the head with a wooden coathanger and knocks him out. You hit Mike Hammer over the head with a wooden coathanger, he'll beat the crap out of you.

Victor Saville was bad news because he wanted money just to do one big picture.

I wrote the original Mike Hammer as a comic, Mike Danger.

One of the most considerable advantages the great have over their inferiors is to have servants as good as themselves.

I have to believe that literature can effect change; otherwise, I would have no purpose in my life and would have wasted four years on Ilustrado.

People whose understanding and taste in literature, painting, and music are beyond question are, for the most part, ignorant of what is good or bad art in the theater.

Literature helps us transcend ourselves.

We think of the romance novel as a lesser form of literature, but I don't think that's true. Love is a very important aspect of human life and worth exploring.

Imaginative literature primarily pleases rather than teaches. It is much easier to be pleased than taught, but much harder to know why one is pleased. Beauty is harder to analyze than truth.

Fortunately age does not affect literature. After a man is dead, he may continue in the business and often rank higher than his living competitors.

When people ask me to define science fiction and fantasy I say they are the literatures that explore the fact that we are toolmakers and users, and are always changing our environment.

I think the job of writing and literature is to encourage each one of us to believe that we're living in a story.

Novels are longer than life.

A responsibility of literature is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.

I graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with an English literature degree and travelled for a year before going to work.

I was inspired to write this book by those who are sceptical of the power of freedom to change the world.

It'll become obvious that we've really been working against ourselves.

I don't go to concerts much. I've heard everything. When I do go to movies, I walk out half the time. As for literature, I've read everything.

We're all going to die. While I'm still here, I want to make a difference.

The good thing about having this illness is that it allows me to be a little bit crazy.

We forget the little things, so it's no wonder some of us screw up the big things.

I want to democratize business news.

I'm one of those writers who tends to be really good at making outlines and sticking to them. I'm very good at doing that, but I don't like it. It sort of takes a lot of the fun out.

I loved writing a book in which, in some ways, it's very, very classical, and in some ways I'm breaking lots of rules about what you can do and what you can't do.

Random violence is incredibly infectious

I think it's dangerous to be optimistic. Things could go terribly wrong virtually overnight

The idea that a student can write a sonnet or a novel without having a sound understanding about its history, and where it fits into literature as a whole, seems to me to be manifestly daft.

God bless my father, but he always spoke in this continental, literary accent, probably because he was a professor of comparative literature and he made the decision to speak with distinction.

No, I don't harbor any mystical ideas about writing, Your Honor, it's work like any other kind of craft; the power of literature, I've always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is.

The unique thing that literature provides is to be able to step so fully into another situation and condition.

I'm not someone who's endlessly patient and wonderful.

And, in a funny way, each death is different and you mourn each death differently and each death brings back the death you mourned earlier and you get into a bit of a pile-up.

The Russian yearning for the meaning of life is the major theme of our literature, and this is the real point of our intelligentsia's existence.

Doesn't the theory of relativity concern literature too? In our world there is no longer any room for the privileged observer, as there is none for the observer of the universe - we are all within.

Well, when you have an opportunity to build a show around one of the greatest detectives in all of literature, you're going to jump at that opportunity.

All you have to do is read the business literature. In the 1930s they were very frightened and they were concerned about how the rising power of the masses was hazardous to industrialists.

Never mind, dear, we're all made the same, though some more than others.

I long for typical days, but rarely get them any more.

I don't believe for one moment you can write well what you wouldn't read for pleasure.

I don't base any character on a real person, and really don't do composites either. I make them up.

I decided to write category romance as I'd recently discovered them, and enjoyed them.