Motivational Quotes

Literature

Remarks are not literature.

- Stein, Gertrude

Best Quotes about Literature

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Stevens, Wallace

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

Pound, Ezra

Perversity is the muse of modern literature.

Sontag, Susan

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

10.

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

11.

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

Borrow, George

12.

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

Colby, Frank Moore

13.

Learning why one great book is just like every other great book is the key to understanding literature

Moschitta, John

14.

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

Stevens, Wallace

15.

All literature is gossip.

Capote, Truman

16.

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

Moore, George

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

25.

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

Cocteau, Jean

26.

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

27.

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

Algren, Nelson

28.

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

Maurois, Andre

29.

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

30.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

Murdoch, Iris

31.

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.

Rushdie, Salman

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Literature is the immortality of speech.

Schlegel, August Wilhelm Von

35.

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

Blair, Hugh

36.

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

Gide, Andre

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Kundera, Milan

40.

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

Age, George

41.

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

42.

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

Hoffer, Eric

43.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

44.

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

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however na?ve that may have been, it was a good deal less na?ve than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.

O'Connor, Flannery

48.

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.

49.

There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

Riding, Laura

50.

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