Literature Quotes

But, like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing...

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ...

If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something trau...

If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something trau...

Homicide is not a sin. It is sometimes a necessary violence on resistant and ossified forms of exist...

One day at Fenner's (the university cricket ground at Cambridge), just before the last war, G. H. Ha...

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies t...

What may be myth in one world may always be fact in some other.

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.

The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good lit...

The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes ar...

In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.

The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out...

The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes hims...

You can be good for the mere sake of goodness; you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You c...

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know ...

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on whic...

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on whic...

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

Mention the gothic, and many readers will probably picture gloomy castles and an assortment of sinis...

In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escap...

He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the ...

I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose sme...

Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.

Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head, warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and ...

Without literature, life is hell.

One must always be careful of books,' said Tessa, 'and what is inside them, for words have the power...

Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.

Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: "You can't deceive me. I know ...

The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the pla...

Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: "You can't deceive me. I know ...

Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we...

If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.

I walked around the library looking for books. I pulled them off the shelves, one by one. But they w...

There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D.H. Lawrence had known that. You needed lov...

It is the custom on the stage in all good, murderous melodramas, to present the tragic and the comic...

Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.

He gave it its present name, and lived here shut up: day and night poring over the wicked heaps of p...

My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs, to which I had access (for...

To have all those noble Romans alive before me, and walking in and out for my entertainment, instead...

The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without ...

Anybody may blame me who likes, when I add further, that, now and then, when I took a walk by myself...

Jane, be still; don't struggle so like a wild, frantic bird, that is rending its own plumage in its ...

Her book has perhaps been a good one; it has refreshed, refilled, rewarmed her heart; it has set her...

Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.

A book did not qualify as literature unless it had polysyllabic words and incomprehensible passages.

I just can't get with this idea that literature is a 12-step program. If someone wants to read a boo...

Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with w...

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.

There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This str...

The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went...

The enduring rapture with magic and fable has always struck me as latently childish and somehow sexl...

I have tried to write about politics in an allusive manner that draws upon other interests and to ap...

Shrouded as he was for a decade in an apparent cloak of anonymity and obscurity, Osama bin Laden was...

I have grown weary of literature: silence alone comforts me. If I continue to write, it’s because I ...

Ela acreditava em anjo e, porque acreditava, eles existiam" | "She believed in angels, and, because ...

Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories ...

That's what literature is. It's the people who went before us, tapping out messages from the past, f...

A big lemoncolored cat watched him from the top of a woodstove. He turned his head to see it better ...

This ferry was taken over by the Yumas and operated for them by a man named Callaghan, but within da...

Summer was full on and the nights hot. It was like lying in warm syrup there in the dark under the v...

Harrogate saw them going along Blount Avenue Sunday morning. They wore outfits all cut from the same...

He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

They began to come upon chains and packsaddles, singletrees, dead mules, wagons. Saddletrees eaten b...

His feet went banging down some stairs. He closed his eyes. They went through cinders and dirt, his ...

When the owner of the pig arrived he found a scrawny and bloodcovered white boychild standing on wha...

Summer was full on and the nights hot. It was like lying in warm syrup there in the dark under the v...

They filed out in descending order by altitudes, the father first, out through the sunlit doors in a...

They passed, leaving a trail of foxfire shuffled up out of the wet leaves like stars plowed in a shi...

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be grasped ...

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.

Horror is the law of the world of living creatures, and civilization is concerned with masking that ...

Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffin...

When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in ...

The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century...

That's the most important thing. If I keep reading, maybe I can hold my own.

We human beings build houses because we're alive but we write books because we're mortal. We live in...

We keep quiet about what we read. Our enjoyment of a book remains a jealously guarded secret. Perhap...

I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.

The idea we came up with, well before we left, was something we coined Performance Literature. Excus...

People are so fucking dumb. Nobody reads anymore, nobody goes out and looks and explores the society...

The only authentic literature of the modern era is the owner’s manual.

Anybody gets to ask questions about any fiction-related issues she wants. No question about literatu...

Anybody gets to ask questions about any fiction-related issues she wants. No question about literatu...

There is something magical to me about literature and fiction and I think it can do things not only ...

It's not what you lift, it's where you carry it.

To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital commu...

Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished...

It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything,...

Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literar...

Literature is mostly about sex and not much about having children and life is the other way around.

It's a special form of scholarly neurosis,´ said Camel. `He's no longer able to distinguish between ...

But you have read Madame Bovary?' (I'd never heard of her books.) 'No.

The art teacher's scarlet book was called Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. 'As the title sugges...

Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one flee...

Language can't describe reality. Literature has no stable reference, no real meaning. Each reader's ...

She was fascinated with words. To her, words were things of beauty, each like a magical powder or po...

Considering that the modern and contemporary literature taught in most universities is largely bleak...

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