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Literature Quotes
"Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use."
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"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
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"I added 'writers' to my list of people not to trust. They make everything up."
6
"The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers."
6
"At last, in 1611, was made, under the auspices of King James, the famous King James version; and this is the great literary monument of the English language."
6
"All good Literature rests primarily on insight."
6
"After Homer and Dante, is a whole century of creating worth one Shakespeare?"
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"Writing is finally play, and there's no reason why you should get paid for playing."
6
"The characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level ' there weren't any images of them, no physical tangibility whatsoever. They were pictures in the reader's head, constructs of imagination and ideas, given shape by the writer's work and skill and the reader's imagination. Parents, of a sort."
6
"Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning."
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"Wherever modern translations of marked excellence were already in existence efforts were made to secure them for the Library, but in a number of instances copyright could not be obtained."
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"However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it."
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"The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write."
5
"But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy."
5
"In France, for instance, one magazine writer was convinced that On The Road had been a huge influence on Lost Souls and was crushed to learn that I hadn't read the one until after I'd written the other."
5
"And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature."
5
"Underground literature only began in the '70s, when technical developments made it possible. Before that, we were involved in a game with the censors. That was our struggle."
5
"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."
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"I imagine that my characters have become much more complicated than when I first began, which would be normal."
5
"Just why I sent it to the publishers would be hard to say, but when I had finished it I felt that it was literature, because it is real and because it was well written. And I know that the world wants such things."
5
"A book that furnishes no quotations is no book - it is a plaything."
5
"Isaac Singer was born in Poland and doesn't write in English. Still, he's an American."
5
"What is the use of theorizing as to wherein lies the charm that moves us?"
5
"It seems to me that an author who has determined very new domains in literature is Gertrude Stein."
5
"In French literature, you can choose a la carte; in Spanish literature, there is only the set meal."
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"Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem."
5
"In the western part of England lived a gentleman of large fortune, whose name was Merton."
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"I read, therefore I'm interested in writers."
5
"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."
5
"My books are water, those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water."
5
"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."
5
"The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have."
5
"You have to expect the raps when you have achieved popularity as a writer."
5
"Few things leave a deeper mark on the reader, than the first book that finds its way to his heart."
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"Nonfiction that smells like fiction is neither."
5
"Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in unexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerales."
5
"The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order."
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"Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor."
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"I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak."
5
"I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time. It was the early summer of 1945, and we walked through the streets of a Barcelona trapped beneath ashen skies as dawn poured over Rambla de Santa Monica in a wreath of liquid copper."
5
"And literature frequently rises to heights that make it international."
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"The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility."
5
"It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg adress was so short. The laws of prose writing are immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. Fr letter to Maxwell Perkins 1945."
5
"All stories are true, Skarpi said. "But this one really happened, if that's what you mean. He took another slow drink, then smiled again, his bright eyes dancing. "More or less. You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way. Too much truth confuses the facts. Too much honesty makes you sound insincere."
5
"Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure."
4
"In Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he's about 75."
4
"I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature."
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