Motivational Quotes

Literature

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.

- Calvino, Italo

Best Quotes about Literature

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

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

Borrow, George

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

Keller, Helen

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

That is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?

Miller, Arthur

Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.

Algren, Nelson

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

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

Pound, Ezra

13.

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

14.

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

Hemingway, Ernest

15.

The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

16.

The truth is that literature, particularly fiction, is not the pure medium we sometimes assume it to be. Response to it is affected by things other than its own intrinsic quality; by a curiosity or lack of it about the people it deals with, their outlook, their way of life.

Palmer, Vance

17.

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

18.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

19.

Literature, as a field of glory, is an arena where a tomb may be more easily found than laurels; and as a means of support, it is the chance of chances.

Giles, Henry

20.

Only the more rugged mortals should attempt to keep up with current literature.

Age, George

21.

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

22.

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

Cocteau, Jean

23.

Leisure without literature is death and burial alive.

Seneca

24.

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

25.

When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behavior by his attitude towards the result of the behavior arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way.

Eliot, T. S.

26.

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

27.

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

28.

All literature is political.

Burton, LeVar

29.

Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.

Wilde, Oscar

30.

Learning why one great book is just like every other great book is the key to understanding literature

Moschitta, John

31.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

Wilder, Thornton

32.

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

33.

There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

Riding, Laura

34.

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

Tzara, Tristan

35.

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

36.

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

37.

All literature is gossip.

Capote, Truman

38.

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

Lewis, Sinclair

39.

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

Miller, Henry

40.

What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is.

Miller, Jonathan

41.

Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

Trilling, Lionel

42.

The party of God and the party of Literature have more in common than either will admit; their texts may conflict, but their bigotries coincide. Both insist on being the sole custodians of the true word and its only interpreters.

Raphael, Frederic

43.

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

Murdoch, Iris

44.

Literature is analysis after the event.

Lessing, Doris

45.

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

46.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

Orwell, George

47.

A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.

Hamilton, Edith

48.

Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished bride of quietness, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.

Eagleton, Terry

49.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

Wilde, Oscar

50.

There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however na?ve that may have been, it was a good deal less na?ve than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.

O'Connor, Flannery