Motivational Quotes

Literature

In the present age, alas! our pens are ravished by unlettered authors and unmannered critics, that make a havoc rather than a building, a wilderness rather than a garden. But, a lack! what boots it to drop tears upon the preterit?

- Beardsley, Aubrey

Best Quotes about Literature

What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.

Miller, Henry

Just as the office worker dreams of murdering his hated boss and so is saved from really murdering him, so it is with the author; with his great dreams he helps his readers to survive, to avoid their worst intentions. And society, without realizing it respects and even exalts him, albeit with a kind of jealousy, fear and even repulsion, since few people want to discover the horrors that lurk in the depths of their souls. This is the highest mission of great literature, and there is no other.

Sabato, Ernesto

The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

Tzara, Tristan

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

Literature must become party literature. Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later. A man can be a Fascist or a Communist and if his outfit gets in he can get to be an ambassador or have a million copies of his books printed by the Government or any of the other rewards the boys dream about.

Hemingway, Ernest

One of the proud joys of the man of letters --if that man of letters is an artist is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world's memory.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball.

Chandler, Raymond

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

Bachelard, Gaston

10.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

Murdoch, Iris

11.

Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.

Barthes, Roland

12.

Literature... is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most reliable of terms in which man names and transforms himself.

Man, Paul De

13.

Literature is the immortality of speech.

Schlegel, August Wilhelm Von

14.

The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.

Trilling, Lionel

15.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

Hemingway, Ernest

16.

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

Lewis, Sinclair

17.

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

Stevens, Wallace

18.

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

Shaw, George Bernard

19.

Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.

James, P. D.

20.

The self-styled intellectual who is impotent with pen and ink hungers to write history with sword and blood.

Hoffer, Eric

21.

Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.

Borges, Jorge Luis

22.

Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.

Paz, Octavio

23.

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

Colby, Frank Moore

24.

With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

25.

How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?

Stevens, Wallace

26.

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

27.

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

Cocteau, Jean

28.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

Kundera, Milan

29.

English literature is a kind of training in social ethics. English trains you to handle a body of information in a way that is conducive to action.

Butler, Marilyn

30.

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

31.

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

Llosa, Mario Vargas

32.

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

Pound, Ezra

33.

The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programs; or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold.

Kundera, Milan

34.

In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.

Frye, Northrop

35.

Leisure without literature is death and burial alive.

Seneca

36.

Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise above its source, so it is true that a national literature cannot rise above the moral level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its inspiration.

Connolly, James

37.

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

38.

Professors of literature, who for the most part are genteel but mediocre men, can make but a poor defense of their profession, and the professors of science, who are frequently men of great intelligence but of limited interests and education

Winters, Yvor

39.

Beardsley, Aubrey

40.

Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.

Lawrence, D. H.

41.

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

Pound, Ezra

42.

In the electronic age, books, words and reading are not likely to remain sufficiently authoritative and central to knowledge to justify literature.

Kernan, Alvin

43.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

Wilder, Thornton

44.

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

45.

Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet, your works will contain them without your knowledge -- they will be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely.

Belinsky, Vissarion

46.

Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.

Pavese, Cesare

47.

It is the story-teller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.

Greene, Graham

48.

When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign -- a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don't want to hear the word mentioned.

Calvino, Italo

49.

It is a good lesson --though it may often be a hard one --for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world's dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of all significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

50.

A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug.

Borrow, George