Motivational Quotes

Literature

Perversity is the muse of modern literature.

- Sontag, Susan

Best Quotes about Literature

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

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

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

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

Stevens, Wallace

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

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

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

Inge, Dean William R.

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

10.

Leisure without literature is death and burial alive.

Seneca

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Sartre, Jean-Paul

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Wilde, Oscar

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Hoffer, Eric

27.

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

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

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

Ford, Ford Madox

31.

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

Fischer, Ernst

32.

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

33.

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

Maurois, Andre

34.

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

35.

Remarks are not literature.

Stein, Gertrude

36.

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.

37.

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

Pound, Ezra

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

Bachelard, Gaston

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Tzara, Tristan

44.

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

Stevens, Wallace

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Colby, Frank Moore

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

Riding, Laura