Motivational Quotes

Literature

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

Best Quotes about Literature

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

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

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

Algren, Nelson

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

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

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

Fischer, Ernst

Leisure without literature is death and burial alive.

Seneca

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

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

Mallarme, Stephane

10.

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

Hoffer, Eric

11.

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

Age, George

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

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.

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

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.

All literature is gossip.

Capote, Truman

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

Remarks are not literature.

Stein, Gertrude

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Pound, Ezra

31.

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

32.

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

Lewis, Sinclair

33.

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

Inge, Dean William R.

34.

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

35.

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

Maurois, Andre

36.

Literature is analysis after the event.

Lessing, Doris

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Cocteau, Jean

41.

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

42.

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

Pound, Ezra

43.

The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.

Blair, Hugh

44.

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

Stevens, Wallace

45.

Perversity is the muse of modern literature.

Sontag, Susan

46.

There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

Riding, Laura

47.

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

48.

A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

49.

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

50.

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

Stevens, Wallace