Motivational Quotes

Literature

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

- Kernan, Alvin

Best Quotes about Literature

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

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

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

To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.

Fischer, Ernst

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

Pound, Ezra

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

Pound, Ezra

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

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

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

Mallarme, Stephane

10.

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

Lewis, Sinclair

11.

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

Colby, Frank Moore

12.

Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst.

Ford, Ford Madox

13.

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

Age, George

14.

Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.

Gide, Andre

15.

I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.

Havel, Vaclav

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Stevens, Wallace

22.

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

23.

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

24.

If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

25.

There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

Riding, Laura

26.

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.

27.

All literature is political.

Burton, LeVar

28.

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

Pound, Ezra

29.

Leisure without literature is death and burial alive.

Seneca

30.

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

Wilde, Oscar

31.

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

32.

If you look at history you'll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict.

Erasmus, Desiderius

33.

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

34.

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

Kundera, Milan

35.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.

Stevens, Wallace

39.

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

40.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

41.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

Wilder, Thornton

42.

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

43.

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

Inge, Dean William R.

44.

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

Moore, George

45.

Literature is analysis after the event.

Lessing, Doris

46.

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

Murdoch, Iris

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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