literature

1.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

- Roosevelt, Eleanor

2.

Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers -- such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a fa?ade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.

- Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

3.

A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate

- Hampton, Christopher

4.

Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing -- he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.

- Trilling, Lionel

5.

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

- Gustave Flaubert

6.

The cultivation of literary pursuits forms the basis of all sciences, and in their perfection consist the reputation and prosperity of kingdoms.

- Pombal, Marques De

7.

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

- Virginia Woolf

8.

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual -- when it begins to ignore the passions, the motions -- it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.

- Isaac Bashevis Singer

9.

There is a cheap literature that speaks to us of the need of escape. It is true that when we travel we are in search of distance. But distance is not to be found. It melts away. And escape has never led anywhere. The moment a man finds that he must play the races, go the Arctic, or make war in order to feel himself alive, that man has begin to spin the strands that bind him to other men and to the world. But what wretched strands! A civilization that is really strong fills man to the brim, though he never stir. What are we worth when motionless, is the question.

- Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

10.

A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.

- Cooley, Charles Horton

11.

You know who the critics are? The men who have failed in literature and art.

- Benjamin Disraeli

12.

One learns little more about a man from his feats of literary memory than from the feats of his alimentary canal.

- Colby, Frank Moore

13.

The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected.

- Rushdie, Salman

14.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

- Carlyle, Thomas

15.

The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.

- Faulkner, William

16.

Novels will be read; but that is all the more reason why women should be trained, by the perusal of a higher, broader, deeper literature, to distinguish the good novel from the bad, the moral from the immoral, the noble from the base, the true work of art from the sham which hides its shallowness and vulgarity under a tangled plot and a melodramatic situation. They should learn--and that they can only learn by cultivation--to discern with joy and drink in with reverence, the good, the beautiful, and the true, and to turn with the fine scorn of a pure and strong womanhood from the bad, the ugly, and the false.

- Lecture on Thrift. 1869.

17.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

- Vidal, Gore

18.

With no other privilege than that of sympathy and sincere good wishes, I would address an affectionate exhortation to the youthful literati, grounded on my own experience. It will be but short; for the beginning,middle, and end converge to one charge: NEVER PURSUE LITERATURE AS A TRADE.

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

19.

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper -- whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.

- Jewett, Sarah Orne

20.

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

- Lewis, Sinclair