Literature Quotes

Society has really no graver interest than the well-being of the literary class.

It's interesting to note that all revolutionary literature was written by pastors. These guys were involved in a revolution against the mightiest power that the world had ever seen.

If you liked a book, don't meet the author

Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does nore than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read.

There is a point, and it is reached more easily than is supposed, where interference with freedom of the arts and literature becomes an attack on the life of society.

Hardly anyone about whom I deeply care at all resembles anyone else I have ever met, or heard of, or read about in literature.

I grew up in Mississippi being told it was a great place, but not feeling that. When I finally began reading seriously, literature showed me something about where I was from which was worthwhile.

So much of young adult literature has turned dark, almost pathological. It's almost as if there is a race to see who can be the most dysfunctional.

I always loved science. And in fact, I got a science award in high school. I mean, I loved science, but I think I loved literature more.

I believe all literature started as gossip.

Never measure literature by accounting statistics. A quarter of working authors earn less than $1,000.

In literature and art memory is a synonym for invention. It is the life-blood of imagination, which faints and dies when the veins are empty.

Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.

I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.

A form of art that I like is portraiture. I've been thinking about portraiture, and its relationship to writing and literature, biography and autobiography, and so that will be my next thing.

I'm the kind of person that wants to analyze and I think having a background in, strangely enough, in like literature and languages, I'm always analyzing things.

I consider what I write to be literature. I choose the words carefully.

I guess I try to find the humor by juxtaposing deeper themes in literature with what people perceive as being lighter, disposable children's fare in comics.

Nearly all novels are too long.

Diversity in literature is, in part, about representation - who is telling the stories and who stories are told about.

Literature seemed to be everything then. People looked to it for the strength to live, for guidance, for revelation.

I believe in the art of literature, I believe in freedom of the imagination, I believe in the kind of liberties that we enjoy in these lucky countries of the world.

In literature and in life we ultimately pursue, not conclusions, but beginnings.

I am especially indebted to a 10th grade English teacher who encouraged me to read great works of literature.

I have nothing but wastes and wilds of self-translation before me for many miserable months to come.

The richest author that ever grazed the common of literature.

Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.

I respect Millar, sir: he has raised the price of literature.

I like books. I've always got a literature book going. I'd be in there reading, in my off time.

Be not merely a man of letters! Let literature be an honorable augmentations to your arms, not constitute the coat or fill the escutcheon!

The spirit of poetry, like all other living powers, must of necessity circumscribe itself by rules, were it only to unite power with beauty.

Never pursue literature as a trade.

We have a name for your disease. We call it a hyper-aesthetic one. You have been encouraged to over-indulge yourself in literature; and have inflamed your organs of fancy.

Life without literary studies is death.

Leisure without literature is death, or rather the burial of a living man -Otium sine litteris mors est et hominis vivi sepultura

I don't read novels that are looking to convince me of anything. I believe that literature needs to be a machine of illusions.

A book is basically just symbols arranged to form this story, this world. But on the other hand, books, novels, literature in general, is what shows us at our most human.

The more we get away from believing and studying literature, the worst we become, the more we lose our soul.

I think literature is somehow both a fantasy and a reality we should all get back to.

I'm a reader and a storyteller, and God chose literature and story and poetry as the languages of my spiritual text. To me, the Bible is a manifesto, a guide, a love letter, a story.

A lot of people have no idea that right now Y.A. (young adult). is the Garden of Eden of literature.

There isn't a lot of poverty literature in the young-adult world. And I don't know why that is, but I think certainly I felt a gap.

If we want to be sincere, we must admit that there is a well-nourished love and an ill-nourished love. And the rest is literature.

Any philosophical and theoretical assurance that laughter is unique to the human being becomes somewhat unsure when one turns to the anthropological literature.

Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.

What is very troubling is that people who have tried to write literature, even, for example, proletarian writers, seem to write within the norms of the dominant class.

Literature in France seems to be undergoing a crisis now, and nothing comes immediately to mind.

When literature becomes deliberately indifferent to the opposition of good and evil it betrays its function and forfeits all claim to excellence.

Literature acknowledges that life is complicated.

What literature brings to our times is always the fact that literature refuses to bring any simple or easy answers.