Literature Quotes

It began in mystery and it will end in mystery, but what a rare and beautiful country lies in betwee...

When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For...

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three o...

I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.

Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's the...

I drove all night, northeast, and once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these p...

Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he ...

a spider and a flyi heard a spiderand a fly arguingwait said the flydo not eat mei serve a great pur...

The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your hea...

And what does a person with such romantic temperament seek in the study of the classics?"If by roman...

What do you think about America?""Everyone always smiles so big! Well—most people. Maybe not so much...

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exis...

Literature is analysis after the event.

this is the weakness of most 'edifying' or 'propaganda' literature. There is no diversity...You cann...

[N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I ...

Hold your pen and spare your voice.

to hell with literaturewe want something redblooded

something genuine like a mark in a toilet, graced with guts and gutted with grace

The literary experience extends impression into discourse. It flowers to thought with nouns, verbs, ...

Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present gene...

The Waves is an extraordinary achievement ... It is trembling on the edge. A little less - and it wo...

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gon...

How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in...

Human beings have their great chance in the novel.

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the cond...

No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good lite...

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definition...

If the ability to read carries the average man no higher than the gossip of his neighbours, if he as...

When this book is mould,And a book of manyWaiting to be soldFor a casual penny,In a little open case...

Stranger, pause and look;From the dust of agesLift this little book,Turn the tattered pages,Read me,...

The artist tries to show reason in experience and appearance – and lyric is the daily appearance, th...

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of comp...

To treat fiction as if it were a religious or moral sermon is about as far from the actuality of lit...

Critical thinking does seem a superior sort of thinking because it seems as though the critic is act...

There are books, that one has for twenty years without reading them, that one always keeps at hand, ...

Books, books, books!I had found the secret of a garret roomPiled high with cases in my father’s name...

In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a cert...

Take my books away, and I should be desperate!

He ate and drank the precious words,His spirit grew robust;He knew no more that he was poor,Nor that...

I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at i...

There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands awayNor any Coursers like a Page Of prancing Poetry...

A precious, mouldering pleasure ’t is To meet an antique book, In just the dress his century wore; A...

He believes that if talent is demanded of a literary publisher or a writer, it must also be demanded...

I asked my publisher what would happen if he sold all the copies of my book he'd printed. He said "I...

Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popu...

Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part yo...

Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged.

She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she reall...

Let me tell you something. You won't mind, will you? Don't have scenes with your young ladies. Try n...

I thought you'd be interested in these things as a government man. Ain't you mixed up in the prices ...

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by peopl...

Great Literature is simply language charged to the utmost with meaning

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.

Literature is news that stays news.

Literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new ...

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings...

Now, Max, I have told you many times that you are my publisher, and permanently, as far as one can f...

The clean book bill will be one of the most immoral measures ever adopted. It will throw American ar...

I have lived so long within the circle of this book [Tender Is The Night] and with these characters ...

I want to be able to do anything with words: handle slashing, flaming descriptions like Wells, and u...

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not throu...

Few are there that will leave the secure seclusion of the scholar's life, the peaceful walks of lite...

The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men

Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to ...

The poet is a faker / Who's so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact.

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I’v...

To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the vis...

Most people are afflicted with an inability to say what they see or think. They say there’s nothing ...

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away i...

Reading Chekhov, I felt not happy, exactly, but as close to happiness as I knew I was likely to come...

I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake...

All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.

Kill me, or you are a murderer.

We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone w...

My job is unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling, which is li...

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading do...

I must warn you that the books I like are not necessarily the ones I think are the best. I like them...

literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people.

Her movements were so stealthy that she seemed to be an invisible creature. Frightened by her strang...

It had never occurred to him until then to think that literature was the best plaything that had eve...

In the end he read everything that came his way, and he did not have a favorite author but rather ma...

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in...

The castle? The monster? The man of learning? I only just thought of it. Surely you know that just a...

My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with in...

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language the struggle of the ade...

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and ab...

If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally.

All choice of words is slang. It marks a class.” “There is correct English: that is not slang.” “I b...

Mrs. Bulstrode's naïve way of conciliating piety and worldliness, the nothingness of this life and d...

We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printe...

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be remind...

But just understand the difference between a man like Reardon and a man like me. He is the old type ...

Personal experience is the basis of all real Literature.

Published memoirs indicate the end of a man's activity and that he acknowledges the end.

[T]he imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.

....And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you ...

Inequality was the price of civilization.

A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic ...