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Literature Quotes
"The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it."
69
"Literature and philosophy both allow past idols to be resurrected with a frequency which would be truly distressing to a sober scientist."
64
"Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood."
59
"The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness."
56
"We don't tend to write about disease in fiction - not just teen novels but all American novels - because it doesn't fit in with our idea of the heroic romantic epic. There is room only for sacrifice, heroism, war, politics and family struggle."
49
"Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil is rightwise king born of all England."
48
"Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction -- Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn ... No -- Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it was what prayed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and the short-winded elations of men."
43
"The novel is a penetrating study of morals and ethics."
42
"A book is a gift you can open again and again."
40
"The house burned an hour before midnight on the last day of April. The wild, distant ringing of the fire bells woke George Hazard. He stumbled through the dark hallway, then upstairs to the mansion tower, and stepped outside into the narrow balcony."
39
"The nastiest kind of writer is a ghostwriter, who bears people's children in their body for money."
39
"Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving."
38
"Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer."
38
"We all come out from Gogol's 'Overcoat'."
37
"A book is not completed till it's read."
37
"All great literature is one of two stories, a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town."
34
"In this course I have tried to reveal the mechanism of those wonderful toys - literary masterpieces. I have tried to make of you good readers who read books not for the infantile purpose of identifying oneself with the characters, and not for the adolescent purpose of learning to live, and not for the academic purpose of indulging in generalizations. I have tried to teach you to read books for the sake of their form, their visions, their art. I have tried to teach you to feel a shiver of artistic satisfaction, to share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author - the joys and difficulties of creation. We did not talk around books, about books; we went to the center of this or that masterpiece, to the live heart of the matter."
33
"Through words to the meaning of thoughts with no words."
32
"Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors."
28
"I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works."
28
"Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it."
28
"What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote."
26
"Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose."
26
"There are few sights sadder than a ruined book."
26
"Falling short of perfection is a process that just never stops."
26
"Read good writing, and don't live in the present. Live in the deep past, with the language of the Koran or the Mabinogion or Mother Goose or Dickens or Dickinson or Baldwin or whatever speaks to you deeply. Literature is not high school and it's not actually necessary to know what everyone around you is wearing, in terms of style, and being influenced by people who are being published in this very moment is going to make you look just like them, which is probably not a good long-term goal for being yourself or making a meaningful contribution. At any point in history there is a great tide of writers of similar tone, they wash in, they wash out, the strange starfish stay behind, and the conches."
26
"Writers say many true things about their own experiences with publicity and promotion."
25
"You can quiz me on Petrarch, Medea, Shakespeare or Dante, I know them all, and I'm sorry, but they've all gone wrong. Dumb glorified men, writing words about love and life as if they knew. As far as I'm concerned, they didn't make it out alive either, so I'm sure as hell not going to go to them for advice."
25
"A novel does not assert anything, a novel poses questions... The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude."
25
"Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger."
24
"I think Maus I is better than Maus II. The standard here is whether or not it's as good as a great book of prose literature and by that standard, no, it's not that great."
24
"The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us."
23
"To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour."
23
"The amateur is very rare in French literature - as rare as he is common in our own."
23
"Sometimes, in a daze, they completely dismantled the cadaver, then found themselves hard put to it to fit the pieces together again."
23
"I went through a phase of reading lots of Urdu poetry, thanks to the great transliterated versions that have become available."
22
"I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them."
22
"Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use."
22
"Last night I thought about all the kerosene I've used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before...It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I come along in two minutes and boom! it's all over."
22
"One of my favourite parts of writing is doing the research. It's the door into that magical reading/writing state - the raw material for making the story real."
22
"I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle showed up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there wil always be a place for them."
21
"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."
21
"I act as the tongue of you,... tied in your mouth . . . . in mine it begins to be loosened."
21
"All good Literature rests primarily on insight."
21
"I've read your summary.""And?""It's not incompetent."Be still, my heart, so I don't faint from such faint phrase. "Did you expect it to be written in crayon?"
21
"Quotation is the highest compliment you can pay an author."
21
"That's how stories happen - with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There's only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story."
21
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