Literature Quotes

there are no inferior types of fiction, only inferior practitionersof them

Good literature boils down to two things: How interesting is the story you are telling, and how interesting is your telling.

The sign of a good novel is what it can cause its reader to see, even if this lies beyond the author's own vision.

...what distinguishes pulp fiction from great literature is how emphatically the work challenges us to interpret it.

Bah! You want to hear the vilest thing a man’s done and you want him to be a hero at the same time!

We can sum up the surrealist distinction between 'literature' and 'poetry' by saying where the former is artificial, fictive and elusive, the latter is natural, real, direct and spontaneous.

Nor is the limitation of what is sayable a limit to the doable: this last is the possibility of literature.

As George Russell defined a literary movement: “Five or six men who live in the same town and hate each other.

Harold Bloom weeps for me.

He who writes to his beloved every day, is not a lover, but a writer.

All the great stories are about obsession and people who are obsessed.

An author who does not support his or her characters does not deserve the support of readers. EVER!

If you read a lot, you will know a lot.

There is more to hear in what is not said.

Irony alone is damning.The flesh will be bland and you will believe you are forever reading the same book.

Good literature is a mirror through which we see ourselves more clearly.

Literature that awakens and inflames feelings is the food of hearts.

Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows.

Not all stories end happily nor tragically. Most of them just need to be continued.

Never try to outgrow the people who were helping you walk, when you could not even walk.

Snowflake’s journey is a metaphor. A metaphor for what, exactly?I have no freaking clue.

But if what can exist does exist, is memory invention or is invention memory?

Look up. This is the season of shooting stars. Light, two thousand years old, still dazzling. Let me see your face. Your face lit up by twenty centuries.

I think therefore I am. Does that mean 'I feel therefore I'm not'? But only through feeling can I get at thinking.

Time: Change experienced and observed. Time measured by the angle of the turning earth as it rotates through its axis. The earth turning slowly on its spit under the fire of the sun.

Treat your mind like a museum, not a warehouse

Literature is the power of fiction itself: not making a claim about what the world is, but about the imagination of a possible world.

That's the beauty and the curse of the 'engrafted word'... it all comes down to interpretation.

He loved words, and he would admit that he was playing with them all the time. He was obsessive about the rhythm of the sentence, and would add a word, subtract a word. [about Truman Capote]

Why is it that human beings are allowed to grow up without the necessary apparatus to make sound ethical decisions?

[Metaphors] replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up.

It is not enough for the hand to touch a book and turn its pages. The pages of a book must touch the heart.

Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows.

Yes, I am confusing literature with life. I'm declaring my own ordinary life to be a work of literature.

Tell me of your Willoughbys, Heathcliffs and Wickhams in literature and I will tell you I met them all.

Poetry and visions, springing as they do from an ever-present sense of mortality, might easily appear morbid to the sturdycommon sense of a burgher-class in the making.

Literature not only illuminated another's experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection

I was working in silence seeking no appreciation or respect from any one. And it is always the silence from which great literature is born.

The real reason for quest is always self-knowledge.

Scholarly acumen sharpens taste and judgment, but we must never mistake criticism for art. Intellectual analysis, however heady, will not nourish the soul.

I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language.

I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid.

Slang surely, as it is called, comes of, and breathes of the personal

Everything is still everything.The Poem Remains.

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

A Christian message or moral cannot redeem a text marred by shoddy workmanship.

But now books and men had gone their separate ways. Who has the patience for a book? Only a book.

If literature stays away from evil, it rapidly becomes boring.

Writers block occurs when a writer has nothing to say. Unfortunately not all writers experience it.

He suddenly saw the enterprise of literature as essentially mad.