Motivational Quotes

Literature

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

- Algren, Nelson

Best Quotes about Literature

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

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.

There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

Riding, Laura

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

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

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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.

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

12.

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

Tzara, Tristan

13.

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.

14.

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

15.

Literature is the immortality of speech.

Schlegel, August Wilhelm Von

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Moore, George

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Maurois, Andre

23.

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

24.

Remarks are not literature.

Stein, Gertrude

25.

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

26.

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

Llosa, Mario Vargas

27.

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

28.

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

Lewis, Sinclair

29.

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

30.

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

Pound, Ezra

31.

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

Gide, Andre

32.

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

33.

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

Colby, Frank Moore

34.

Despair, feeding, as it always does, on phantasmagoria, is imperturbably leading literature to the rejection, en masse, of all divine and social laws, towards practical and theoretical evil.

Lautreamont, Isidore Ducasse, Comte De

35.

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

36.

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

Pound, Ezra

37.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

Wilder, Thornton

38.

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

39.

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

Fischer, Ernst

40.

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

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.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

I am not a literary man. I am a man of science, and I am interested in that branch of Anthropology which deals with the history of human speech.

Murray, Jim

49.

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.

50.

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

Trilling, Lionel