Literature Quotes

If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.

Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.

People perish. Books are immortal.

Kill me, or you are a murderer.

She's got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy.

In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility.

The cinema occupies an important place in the overall development of art and literature.

In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy.

When the pressure comes, preferences give way while convictions hold firm.

Literature is about being a complex, contradictory human being.

Although charismatic, James Dean is no Harrison Ford. In the majority of his movies, sooner or later he got the crap beaten out of him.

My sore throats are always worse than anyone's.

Men, like bullets, go farthest when they are smoothest.

Great God of the Ants, thou hast granted victory to thy servants. I appoint thee honorary Colonel.

Practically every movie that shows the pope or even a bishop as a character, and in much of western literature of the last 300 or 400 years, these are portrayed as awful figures.

A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.

Knowledge is justified belief.

The world is crawling with authors touring now. They're like performance artists.

I feed on good soup, not beautiful language.

Be able to cite three good qualities of every relative or acquaintance that you dislike.

The Irishman in English literature may be said to have been born with an apology in his mouth.

If you would be known, and not know, vegetate in a village; if you would know, and not be known, live in a city.

The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.

The ruling passion, be it what it will. The ruling passion conquers reason still.

Great men are seldom over-scrupulous in the arrangement of their attire.

When the heroes go off the stage, the clowns come on.

There are two kinds of egotists: Those who admit it, and the rest of us

I am also well aware that literature only has a minimal influence on political disputes or economic crises in the world, but its significance to human beings is ancient.

There is little more powerful than when truth joins action.

Culture is fundamental. Literature saves you. Cinema saves you.

On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.

Of all follies there is none greater than wanting to make the world a better place.

Sexuality poorly repressed unsettles some families; well repressed, it unsettles the whole world.

I don't see gender as the most significant fact of human existence.

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

Great literature transcends its native land, but none that I know of ignores its soil.

There are a lot of people who are doing wonderful things, quietly, with no motive of greed, or hostility toward other people, or delusions of superiority.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

I am the shore and the ocean, awaiting myself on both sides.

I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.

The spectacles of experience; through them you will see more clearly a second time.

If you don't know what you want, you end up with a lot you don't.

Terrence, the Roman slave who freed himself with his writings, once observed, "I am a human being. Nothing human is alien to me." That could be the motto of literature!

The unusual is only found in a very small percentage, except in literary creations, and that is exactly what makes literature.

Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.

Faith is not a thing which one loses, we merely cease to shape our lives by it.

Literature provides us with experiences it would not be wise or possible to introduce into our own world and thus enlarges our understanding of the world.

Conflict is the soul of literature.

A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance.