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Motivational Quotes

Literature

The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.
- Hemingway, Ernest
Literature Motivational Quotes



Best Quotes about Literature

1.
In the electronic age, books, words and reading are not likely to remain sufficiently authoritative and central to knowledge to justify literature.
Kernan, Alvin

2.
Literature is analysis after the event.
Lessing, Doris

3.
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

4.
The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel

5.
Only the more rugged mortals should attempt to keep up with current literature.
Age, George

6.
The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.
Havel, Vaclav

7.
Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
Trilling, Lionel

8.
How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
Stevens, Wallace

9.
The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.
Blair, Hugh

10.
Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.
Sagan, Francoise

11.
Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.
Rushdie, Salman

12.
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

13.
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

14.
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

15.
Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that
Woolf, Virginia

16.
Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
Lewis, Sinclair

17.
Already the writers are complaining that there is too much freedom. They need some pressure. The worse your daily life, the better your art. If you have to be careful because of oppression and censorship, this pressure produces diamonds.
Tolstaya, Tatyana

18.
All literature is gossip.
Capote, Truman

19.
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

20.
All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it. Many of the so-called politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently . Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness.
Hemingway, Ernest

21.
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

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.
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

24.
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.

25.
Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.
Lawrence, D. H.

26.
The self-styled intellectual who is impotent with pen and ink hungers to write history with sword and blood.
Hoffer, Eric

27.
There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.
Llosa, Mario Vargas

28.
Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.
Gide, Andre

29.
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

30.
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.

31.
If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
Pound, Ezra

32.
There can be no literary equivalent to truth.
Riding, Laura

33.
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

34.
The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.
Hemingway, Ernest

35.
In literature, as in love, we are astonished at the choice made by other people.
Maurois, Andre

36.
Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!
Lawrence, D. H.

37.
The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who hands over to the words.
Mallarme, Stephane

38.
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

39.
The existence of good bad literature --the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously --is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.
Orwell, George

40.
By and large the literature of a democracy will never exhibit the order, regularity, skill, and art characteristic of aristocratic literature; formal qualities will be neglected or actually despised. The style will often be strange, incorrect, overburdened, and loose, and almost always strong and bold. Writers will be more anxious to work quickly than to perfect details. Short works will be commoner than long books, wit than erudition, imagination than depth. There will be a rude and untutored vigor of thought with great variety and singular fecundity. Authors will strive to astonish more than to please, and to stir passions rather than to charm taste.
Tocqueville, Alexis De

41.
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

42.
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.

43.
All literature is political.
Burton, LeVar

44.
The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation.
Appelfeld, Aharon

45.
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

46.
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

47.
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

48.
The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
Pound, Ezra

49.
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
Wilde, Oscar

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


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