Literature Quotes

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

In reality there is no kind of evidence or argument by which one can show that Shakespeare, or any o...

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a myster...

I started studying law, but this I could stand just for one semester. I couldn't stand more. Then I ...

There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature...

These studies are the result of my attempt to extract the essence of literature. Literature is eithe...

Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature ...

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

It is very easy to love alone.

Shakespeare's bitter play [Troilus and Cressida] is therefore a dramatization of a part of a transla...

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes...

What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to m...

Good art is always dangerous, always open-ended. Once you put it out in the world you lose control o...

The discovery of the horror tale at an early age was fortuitous for me. This sort of tale serves, in...

Beneath beautiful appearances I search out ugly depths, and beneath ignoble surfaces I probe for the...

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do n...

So long as there is gold underneath, who cares about the dust on top? Literature! That old whore! We...

To return to antiquity [in literature]: that has been done. To return to the Middle Ages: that too h...

Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very ...

You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem t...

There is a part of everything which is unexplored,because we are accustomed to using our eyes only i...

Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.

Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at...

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat ...

Pragmatically, aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those ...

There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me tw...

There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myse...

Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it, is in the first place 'literary', which is to say p...

Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.

We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.

Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.

Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classro...

Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the ...

To be a good diarist one must have a little snouty sneaky mind.

I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I...

Where they burn books, at the end they also burn people

We rely upon the poets, the philosophers, and the playwrights to articulate what most of us can only...

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the...

Literature is my utopia.

Many scholars forget, it seems to me, that our enjoyment of the great works of literature depends mo...

Literature is my Utopia

More than at any other time, when I hold a beloved book in my hand my limitations fall from me, my s...

In a word, literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me o...

I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the in...

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from t...

I am conscious of a soul-sense that lifts me above the narrow, cramping circumstances of my life. My...

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will t...

In books, that which is most generally interesting is what comes home to the most cherished private ...

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our con...

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.

The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present...

Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our...

The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a languag...

Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and pra...

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book exists for us pe...

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our con...

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, a...

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions o...

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of bei...

She’s the latest freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She’s the self-made girl!(…)Well, t...

Before he went away, he had heard all about the self-made girl, and there was something in the pictu...

Let us be vulgar and have some fun, let us invite the President.

literature coming from the cold corpse of a whore is the last thing to be served in bed.

I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page...

Sunday is the golden clasp that binds together the volume of the week.

One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinar...

Among the many worlds which man did not receive as a gift of nature, but which he created with his o...

O how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. One knew no...

Oh! Let us never never doubt What nobody is sure about.

The llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat with an indolent expression and an undulating throa...

The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.

The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare sp...

I am in favour of illusion, not alienation... Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present m...

There's all this stuff that is happening in Edinburgh now, it's a sad attempt to create an Edinburgh...

Sitting in the brightly lit library, surrounded by books, in total silence, that was ma personal zen...

...We now know the basic rules governing the universe, together with the gravitational interrelation...

It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.

A classic is a book that has never finished what it wants to say.

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have ...

I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or, rather:that man is call...

Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.

Reading is solitude. One reads alone, even in another's presence.

Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end...

If the ancients had been able to see it as I see it now, Mr. Palomar thinks, they would have thought...

Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remain...

I think that my first impulse arises from a hypersensitivity or allergy. It seems to me that languag...

In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of ...

It can also be useful to politics, enabling that science to discover how much of it is no more than ...

This is the paradox of the power of literature: it seems that only when it is persecuted does it sho...

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say...

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that ...

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprun...

You have never asked for anything, yet you have become an albatross around my neck. Your bony arms a...