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Literature Quotes
"Literature and philosophy both allow past idols to be resurrected with a frequency which would be truly distressing to a sober scientist."
214
"The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it."
182
"Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood."
182
"The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness."
166
"Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil is rightwise king born of all England."
152
"A book is not completed till it's read."
142
"The novel is a penetrating study of morals and ethics."
101
"The nastiest kind of writer is a ghostwriter, who bears people's children in their body for money."
97
"I cannot choose one hundred best books because I have only written five."
91
"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."
84
"All great literature is one of two stories, a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town."
83
"A book is a gift you can open again and again."
78
"It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much."
78
"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."
78
"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."
77
"We all come out from Gogol's 'Overcoat'."
76
"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."
75
"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."
74
"I act as the tongue of you,... tied in your mouth . . . . in mine it begins to be loosened."
73
"Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead."
72
"I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before."
72
"After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust and ashes?"
70
"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."
70
"In the literature of France Moliere occupies the same kind of position as Cervantes in that of Spain, Dante in that of Italy, and Shakespeare in that of England. His glory is more than national - it is universal."
69
"Through words to the meaning of thoughts with no words."
69
"What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote."
68
"These paper boats of mine are meant to dance on the ripples of hours, and not reach any destination."
68
"Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving."
68
"Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility."
67
"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."
67
"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."
67
"I think that pretty much every form of fiction (I'd include fantasy, obviously) can actually be a real escape from places where you feel bad, and from bad places. It can be a safe place you go, like going on holiday, and it can be somewhere that, while you've escaped, actually teaches you things you need to know when you go back, that gives you knowledge and armour and tools to change the bad place you were in.So no, they're not escapist. They're escape."
66
"The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting."
66
"A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous."
65
"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."
65
"My book is traditional. It runs counter to the post-modern spirit."
64
"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?"
64
"I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature."
63
"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."
63
"A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child."
63
"Quotation is the highest compliment you can pay an author."
63
"I suppose half the time Shakespeare just shoved down anything that came into his head."
61
"There are many, many types of books in the world, which makes good sense, because there are many, many types of people, and everybody wants to read something different."
61
"A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early."
60
"The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half a dozen wonderful mustaches checked Winterbourne's impulse to go straightway to see her."
60
"The short story, on the other hand, is the perfect American form."
60
"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."
59
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