Literature Quotes

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man - the biography of the man himself cannot be ...

High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.

It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earth...

I would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.

The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades.

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life

…This remains the great deficiency of literature: its imitation of nature cannot prepare you for the...

Imagine that the genome is a book.There are twenty-three chapters, called CHROMOSOMES.Each chapter c...

In short, to enter the lists of literature is wilfully to expose yourself to the arrows of neglect, ...

The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolut...

Our existence has always and everywhere been tragic, but man has converted these numberless tragedie...

Like some wondrous birds out of fairy tales, books sang their songs to me and spoke to me as though ...

When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a youn...

He whom the gods love dies young.

Gormenghast. Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tract...

One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door,...

I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that silence.

Did I know myself less, I might perhaps venture to handle something or other to the bottom, and to b...

A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the...

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes fr...

In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon ag...

This person has hoped and dreamed and now it is really happening and this person can hardly believe ...

I don't hold with shamans, witch doctors, or psychiatrists. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or even Dickens, u...

When a child is born, I once explained to the kids, some dads lay down bottles of wine for them that...

The universe is made up of stories not of atoms.

The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratif...

It symbolizes a spear, and in this sorry world the symbol is the thing.

Literature does not occur in a vacuum. It cannot be a monologue. It has to be a conversation, and ne...

It is naive to suppose that something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in anothe...

To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.

I would never attempt to dissuade anyone from reading a book. But please, if you're reading somethin...

She regretted the explanation immediately, but that was because she always regretted everything

Experience, then, was something that enabled you to do nothing with a clear conscience. Experience w...

I don't mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way--characters saying th...

(from his random observations after reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens)In the Old Curiosit...

The singular power of literature lies not in its capacity for accurate representation of mass common...

When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that mad...

A word aptly uttered or written cannot be cut away by an axe.

I had as yet no notion that life every now and then becomes literature—not for long, of course, but ...

I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected ...

Illusion is whatever is fixed or definable, and reality is best understood as its negation…

A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being th...

The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) i...

Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy sh...

What the critic as a teacher of language tries to teach is not an elegant accomplishment, but the me...

But why," he said with animation, "do the English not read their own great literature?"Victor laughe...

A union of literary and scientific cultures – there was not the dissociation of sensibility that was...

Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among th...

You're like, both like, Alexander the Great.'We can't both be Alexander.'Well sometimes I think you'...

As often I have been a science fiction writer writing science fiction for the community of science f...

We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the rea...

Any connoisseur knows you've got to be drunk to really enjoy a good romance.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That...

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is...

Journalism is unreadable, and literature is unread.

Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.

Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.

To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of th...

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is ...

The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who...

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and ...

I wrote when I did not know life;now that I know life, I have no more to say.

I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things...

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is ...

Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. Mor...

Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one’s own race, nearer perhaps in type and tempera...

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.    To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim....

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to u...

...with each new book of mine I have always the feeling that this time I have picked a lemon in the ...

There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.

This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if he do but search diligently, find the literatu...

Sir,’ said Stephen, ‘I read novels with the utmost pertinacity. I look upon them--I look upon good n...

As it is I'm a dated novelist, whom hardly anybody reads, or if they do, most of them don't understa...

As it is I'm a dated novelist, whom hardly anybody reads, or if they do, most of them don't understa...

As it is I'm a dated novelist, whom hardly anybody reads, or if they do, most of them don't understa...

As it is I'm a dated novelist, whom hardly anybody reads, or if they do, most of them don't understa...

Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour a...

[T]he only luxury he allows himself is buying books, paperback books, mostly novels, American novels...

It was. It will never be again. Remember.

I learned that books are never finished, that it is possible for stories to go on writing themselves...

The topography of literature, the fact in fiction,is one of my pleasures -- I mean, where the living...

Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is li...

Our thoughts of literary renaissance should always center themselves on the removal of superstition,...

People are talking high of Thiruvalluvar. But in practice they do not respect his teachings. They ac...

The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, eng...

The act of true reading is in its very essence democratic. Consider the nature of what happens when ...

Stories don’t teach us to be good; it isn’t as simple as that. They show us what it feels like to be...

Stories don’t teach us to be good; it isn’t as simple as that. They show us what it feels like to be...

All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unabl...

Is it foolish to care for non-existent folk?Then, leave me to my foolishness.

I can relate to Marguerite Duras even though I'm not French, nor have I been consumed by love for an...

Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the w...

I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I ...

I can imagine her memories of the novel, or, more likely, of who she was and how she felt when readi...

I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I ...

Sex, like art, can unsettle a soul, can grind a heart in a mortar. Sex, like literature, can sneak t...

In learning a language, when from mere words we reach the laws of words, we have gained a great deal...

I can find my biography in every fable that I read.