Motivational Quotes

Literature

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

Best Quotes about Literature

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 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

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.

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

Fischer, Ernst

Perversity is the muse of modern literature.

Sontag, Susan

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

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

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

Tzara, Tristan

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Trilling, Lionel

15.

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.

16.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

Wilder, Thornton

17.

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

18.

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

Wilde, Oscar

19.

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

Shaw, George Bernard

20.

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

21.

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

Blair, Hugh

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Stevens, Wallace

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

Remarks are not literature.

Stein, Gertrude

29.

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

30.

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

Pound, Ezra

31.

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

Stevens, Wallace

32.

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

33.

Professors of literature, who for the most part are genteel but mediocre men, can make but a poor defense of their profession, and the professors of science, who are frequently men of great intelligence but of limited interests and education

Winters, Yvor

34.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

35.

Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished bride of quietness, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.

Eagleton, Terry

36.

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

Ford, Ford Madox

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

42.

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

Llosa, Mario Vargas

43.

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

44.

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

Kernan, Alvin

45.

The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programs; or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold.

Kundera, Milan

46.

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

Stevens, Wallace

47.

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

48.

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

Borrow, George

49.

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

50.

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