Literature Quotes

An artist is the magician put among men to gratify--capriciously--their urge for immortality. The te...

The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

You are my shaper and my world as well. It is done. No need to choose.

When Mats came in the evenings, they would drink tea in the kitchen while reading their books and ta...

Every page should explode, either because of its staggering absurdity, the enthusiasm of its princip...

Fitzgerald has charm. It's a silly word, but it's an exact word for me. I like 'The Great Gatsby' an...

The crown of literature is poetry.

When the critic has said everything in his power about a literary text, he has still said nothing; f...

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now...

What is fantasy? On one level, of course, it is a game: a pure pretense with no ulterior motive what...

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human powe...

A fantasy is a journey. It is a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is. Like ...

There's a saying," Aeneas said: "Keep an eye on Greeks when they offer gifts." He spoke wryly. "Hors...

Critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury the greatest work of imaginative fict...

The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has ...

What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And -- though played...

Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent

We do not claim that the portrait we are making is the whole truth, only that it is a resemblance.

Music enriches people's lives in the same way paintings and literature do. Everybody deserves that.

I've always felt that the performance of a raag resembles a novel - or at least the kind of novel I'...

(...) Sir Boris had fought and killed the Paynim; Sir Gawain, the Turk; Sir Miles, the Pole; Sir And...

No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and...

Are we not acceptable, moon? Are we not lovely sitting together here, I in my satin; he in black and...

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves whereas a person m...

And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real ...

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all ...

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.

...to use the little kick of energy which opposition supplies to be more vigorously oneself.

Clarissa had a theory in those days - they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people h...

She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like imper...

She liked getting hold of some book... and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privac...

The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still ...

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural...

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another.

She had thought of literature all these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must be her excuse) ...

the whole of Victorian literature done up in grey paper & neatly tied with string

Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegat...

I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by liter...

The fact about contemporaries is that they're doing the same thing on another railway line: one rese...

To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how...

The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to fol...

Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then—our friends are not able to finish their st...

About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dream...

In the flailing light they all looked sharp-edged and ethereal and divided by great distances

This irritated or puzzled such students of literature and their professors as were accustomed to ‘se...

Great novels are above all great fairy tales . . . literature does not tell the truth but makes it u...

A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his ...

For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bl...

I sometimes used to ask myself, what on earth did I love her for? Maybe fore the warm hazel iris of ...

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

And speaking of this wonderful machine:[840] I’m puzzled by the difference b

The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with th...

Vladimir Nabokov“... one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, ...

In this course I have tried to reveal the mechanism of those wonderful toys — literary masterpieces....

Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the hear...

There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anythin...

... she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red appl...

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that liter...

We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ...

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imag...

And speaking of this wonderful machine:[840] I’m puzzled by the difference between, the kind Which g...

I will not mention the name (and what bits of it I happen to give here appear in decorous disguise) ...

And if I am not mistaken here is the secret of the greatness that was Spain. In Spain it is men that...

He began to read at haphazard. He entered upon each system with a little thrill of excitement, expec...

Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know t...

If you could forget mortality... You could really believe that time is circular, and not linear and ...

Sail Forth- Steer for the deep waters only. Reckless O soul, exploring. I with thee and thou with me...

You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and wat...

To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and signi...

have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood asid...

Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict. Science, (twin, in its fields, of Demo...

Since the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart, and a host of others have shown that this rel...

Analysis goes a step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to ...

Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.

That's why I've just gone on … collecting this particular kind of stuff – what you might call riff-r...

Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed autho...

In the present day, when popular literature is running into the low levels of life, and luxuriating ...

For my part, I love to give myself up to the illusion of poetry. A hero of fiction that never existe...

Until modern times, we focused a great deal of the best of our thought upon rituals of return to the...

The books—the generous friends who met me without suspicion—the merciful masters who never used me i...

You are not to take it, if you please, as the saying of an ignorant man, when I express my opinion t...

...but which of us has read every line of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or The Divine Comedy, or Paradis...

There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing i...

It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative wa...

As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granari...

Words are the only things that last for ever.

It may be whispered to those uninitiated people who are anxious to know the habits and make the acqu...

Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several...

In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius pointed out a very central truth concerning the examined life. That is...

For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt th...

I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet d...

To leap over the wall of self, to look through another’s eyes--this is valuable experience, which li...

The attitude that poetry should not be analyzed is prevalent among many who consider themselves expe...

A story is a wedding in which we listeners are the groom watching the bride coming up the aisle. It ...

Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is color that makes sense, so a story is life th...

Literature is painting, architecture, and music.