Motivational Quotes

Literature

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

Best Quotes about 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

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

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor.

Auden, W. H.

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

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

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

Pound, Ezra

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

10.

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

11.

Perversity is the muse of modern literature.

Sontag, Susan

12.

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.

13.

Leisure without literature is death and burial alive.

Seneca

14.

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

15.

The only privilege literature deserves -- and this privilege it requires in order to exist -- is the privilege of being in the arena of discourse, the place where the struggle of our languages can be acted out.

Rushdie, Salman

16.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

17.

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

Moschitta, John

18.

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

Llosa, Mario Vargas

19.

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

20.

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

21.

In literature, as in love, we are astonished at the choice made by other people.

Maurois, Andre

22.

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

23.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.

Hemingway, Ernest

24.

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

25.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

26.

Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.

Man, Paul De

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Kundera, Milan

30.

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

31.

Literature flourishes best when it is half trade and half an art.

Inge, Dean William R.

32.

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

Tzara, Tristan

33.

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

34.

Literature is the immortality of speech.

Schlegel, August Wilhelm Von

35.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

36.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

Wilder, Thornton

37.

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

38.

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

39.

The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who hands over to the words.

Mallarme, Stephane

40.

Literature is analysis after the event.

Lessing, Doris

41.

There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

Riding, Laura

42.

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

Miller, Henry

43.

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

44.

A literary movement consists of five or six people who live in the same town and hate each other cordially.

Moore, George

45.

Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!

Pirandello, Luigi

46.

It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important.

Mcewan, Ian

47.

Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.

Pound, Ezra

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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