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Literature

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 Motivational Quotes



Best Quotes about Literature

1.
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

2.
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

3.
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

4.
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

5.
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

6.
In the electronic age, books, words and reading are not likely to remain sufficiently authoritative and central to knowledge to justify literature.
Kernan, Alvin

7.
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

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

9.
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

10.
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

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

13.
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

14.
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Pound, Ezra

15.
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

16.
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

17.
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

18.
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

19.
The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
Cocteau, Jean

20.
Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.
Algren, Nelson

21.
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

22.
Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Stevens, Wallace

23.
Literature flourishes best when it is half trade and half an art.
Inge, Dean William R.

24.
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

25.
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

26.
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

27.
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

28.
A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.
Woolf, Virginia

29.
Perversity is the muse of modern literature.
Sontag, Susan

30.
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

31.
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

32.
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

33.
Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
Trilling, Lionel

34.
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

35.
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
Kundera, Milan

36.
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.

37.
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
Murdoch, Iris

38.
The self-styled intellectual who is impotent with pen and ink hungers to write history with sword and blood.
Hoffer, Eric

39.
Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
Bachelard, Gaston

40.
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

41.
Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
Lewis, Sinclair

42.
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

43.
Learning why one great book is just like every other great book is the key to understanding literature
Moschitta, John

44.
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

45.
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

46.
To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.
Fischer, Ernst

47.
A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug.
Borrow, George

48.
In literature, as in love, we are astonished at the choice made by other people.
Maurois, Andre

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

50.
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


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