Quotes and Sayings about Literature
"I understand that postmodern literature probably means people like DeLillo, The Fiction Collective, but I don't get it that those writers are really influenced by postmodern theorists."
- Kathy Acker
(Related: People, Fiction, Literature, Writers)
"I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist."
- Henry Brooks Adams
(Related: Art, Politics, Literature)
"Only the more rugged mortals should attempt to keep up with current literature."
- George Ade
(Related: Literature)
"Few are there that will leave the secure seclusion of the scholar's life, the peaceful walks of literature and learning, to stand out a target for the criticism of unkind and hostile minds."
- Felix Adler
(Related: Life, Criticism, Learning, Literature, Will)
"For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian."
- Ama Ata Aidoo
(Related: African, Artist, Corruption, Fight, Literature)
"My family pleaded with me to forget literature and do something sensible, such as find some sort of useful work."
- Lloyd Alexander
(Related: Family, Work, Forget, Literature)
"Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity."
- Nelson Algren
(Related: Legal, Challenge, Conscience, Humanity, Literature)
"When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfarthers of Blair and little Bush were scratching around in caves."
- Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
(Related: Law, Literature, Mathematics, Writing)
"Allen Ginsberg was a world authority on the writing of William Blake, and had an incredible knowledge of classic literature and world politics."
- David Amram
(Related: Politics, Knowledge, Authority, Literature, World, Writing)
"I wish to share and pass down some of my generation's traits, and encourage young people to create their own art, music, and literature."
- David Amram
(Related: Art, Music, People, Literature)
"There is grand romance in The Lord of the Rings. It's an important part of epic literature."
- Kevin J. Anderson
(Related: Romance, Literature)
"Like most kids growing up, I had a very wide interest. I was interested in everything. I tried to take advantage of everything, from the sciences to music to writing to literature."
- Michael P. Anderson
(Related: Music, Growing up, Interest, Kids, Literature, Writing)
"I think it is a mistake to identify a movie according to its language, as if movies were literature."
- Jean-Jacques Annaud
(Related: Movies, Mistake, Language, Literature)
"There is a broad cultural current that conveys the idea that a film is like a football team, it represents a nation, it is illustrated literature, filmed radio. These are outdated concepts, totally out of touch with today's realities."
- Jean-Jacques Annaud
(Related: Idea, Film, Football, Literature, Nation, Today)
"SF is the literature of the theoretically possible, and F is the literature of the impossible."
- Piers Anthony
(Related: Literature)
"No one bothered reading the books and understanding - and again, I'm not being high-falutin' about it - but I think our books are great literature with great metaphors of real life dealing with fears and hopes."
- Avi Arad
(Related: Life, Being, Books, Literature, Metaphors, Reading, Understanding)
"For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment."
- Matthew Arnold
(Related: Power, Creation, Literature, Man)
"Journalism is literature in a hurry."
- Matthew Arnold
(Related: Journalism, Literature)
"We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human."
- Antonin Artaud
(Related: Men, Literature, Want)
"Literature is air, and I'm suffocating in mediocrity."
- Armand Assante
(Related: Literature, Mediocrity)
"The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose."
- Margaret Atwood
(Related: Answers, Literature, Questions)
"At this point we've answered about every question you could possibly imagine about Deep Space Nine, so we do this thing called Theatrical Jazz, where we do a show of bits and pieces of things from plays and literature, poetry... stuff that we like. It's fun."
- Rene Auberjonois
(Related: Poetry, Deep, Fun, Jazz, Literature, Question, Space)
"When they were done downloading all the information off each hard drive, they took all the computers, all the literature, and loaded everything into a big white truck and left."
- Sherman Austin
(Related: Computers, Information, Literature)
"Indeed; peace literature is almost exclusively read, though to good effect, by pacifists, while what is needed is the canvassing of those who have not so far been won to the cause."
- Fredrik Bajer
(Related: Peace, Cause, Effect, Literature)
"There are those who believe we have need of more literature, of a large international publishing house, of a great peace newspaper, or the like. I am rather skeptical about this idea."
- Fredrik Bajer
(Related: Peace, Idea, Literature, Publishing)
"When the drama attains a characterization which makes the play a revelation of human conduct and a dialogue which characterizes yet pleases for itself, we reach dramatic literature."
- George P. Baker
(Related: Drama, Literature, Play)
"The instinct to impersonate produces the actor; the desire to provide pleasure by impersonations produces the playwright; the desire to provide this pleasure with adequate characterization and dialogue memorable in itself produces dramatic literature."
- George P. Baker
(Related: Actor, Desire, Instinct, Literature, Pleasure)
"Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century."
- J. G. Ballard
(Related: Science, Fiction, Literature, Reality)
"I began as a boy with artistic talent... as a visual artist... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature."
- Russell Banks
(Related: Talent, Thought, Artist, Literature, Reading)
"Literature is the question minus the answer."
- Roland Barthes
(Related: Literature, Question)
"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."
- Roland Barthes
(Related: Literature, Saying, Trouble, Worth)
"In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us."
- Charles Baudelaire
(Related: Aristocracy, Being, Danger, Ethics, Glory, Literature)
"There's a wealth of literature out there which, hopefully, will be, you know, exploded in the future, and I personally find it very rewarding to be involved with classic storytelling, and sort of legendary characters."
- Sean Bean
(Related: Wealth, Future, Literature, Will)
"Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author's soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted."
- Robert Benchley
(Related: Soul, Literature, Present, Spring)
"In French literature, you can choose a la carte; in Spanish literature, there is only the set meal."
- Jose Bergamin
(Related: Literature)
"Literature is about as unnecessarily necessarily as tableware or ironed shirts."
- Peter Bichsel
(Related: Literature)
"The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible."
- Hugh Blair
(Related: Bible, Literature, Purity, Style)
"I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist."
- Harold Bloom
(Related: Criticism, Literature)
"What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering."
- Harold Bloom
(Related: End, Literature, Suffering)
"The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective."
- Harold Bloom
(Related: Literary, Literature, University, Will, World)
"Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo clinic."
- Roy Blount, Jr.
(Related: Women, Learning, Literature)
"If you say city to people, people have no problem thinking of the city as rife with problematic, screwed-up people, but if you say suburbs - and I'm not the first person to say this, it's been said over and over again in literature - there's a sense of normalcy."
- Eric Bogosian
(Related: People, First, Literature, Sense, Thinking)
"The knowledge of languages was very useful. I have a university degree in foreign languages and literature."
- Emma Bonino
(Related: Knowledge, Literature, University)
"The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century."
- Daniel J. Boorstin
(Related: Power, Advertising, Force, Literature, Word)
"In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects."
- Jorge Luis Borges
(Related: Act, Causes, Infinite, Literature, Order)
"A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug."
- George Borrow
(Related: Literature, Losing, Trade)
"That a literature in our time is living is shown in that way that it debates problems."
- Georg Brandes
(Related: Time, Literature, Living, Problems)
"Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on."
- David Brin
(Related: Age, Change, Science, People, Fiction, Literature)
"Bad literature is a form of treason."
- Joseph Brodsky
(Related: Literature, Treason)
"Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues."
- Phillips Brooks
(Related: Life, Work, Literature, World)
"Don't ask to live in tranquil times. Literature doesn't grow there."
- Rita Mae Brown
(Related: Literature)
"Literature is my calling To hold up the mirror to my countrymen comes natural to me; and in the open field of invention I am not without hopes of giving them pleasure."
- Thomas Edward Brown
(Related: Giving, Invention, Literature, Open, Pleasure)
"It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave."
- Anatole Broyard
(Related: Love, American, Literature, Nostalgia, Paradoxes, Writers)
"All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what's cool."
- Steven Brust
(Related: Literature, Will, Writer)
"For Mythology is the handmaid of literature; and literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness."
- Thomas Bulfinch
(Related: Happiness, Virtue, Literature, Mythology)
"Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated."
- Thomas Bulfinch
(Related: Knowledge, Language, Literature, Mythology)
"In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern."
- Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
(Related: Science, Literature)
"The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work."
- Augusten Burroughs
(Related: Life, Work, Being, Future, Literature, Study, Writer, Writing)
"All literature is political."
- LeVar Burton
(Related: Literature)
"Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself."
- Samuel Butler
(Related: Architecture, Music, Work, Literature, Man)
"The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money."
- Samuel Butler
(Related: Art, Money, War, Literature)
"All literature is gossip."
- Truman Capote
(Related: Gossip, Literature)
"There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write."
- Thomas Carlyle
(Related: Men, Discovery, Literary, Literature, Quantity)
"I've always said that music is like literature."
- Jose Carreras
(Related: Music, Literature)
"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."
- Michael N. Castle
(Related: African, American, Civil rights, Famous, Literature, Struggle)
"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."
- Willa Cather
(Related: Literature, Mind, Years)
"Literature is the denunciation of the times in which one lives."
- Camilo Jose Cela
(Related: Literature)
"An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence."
- Raymond Chandler
(Related: Age, Poetry, Cleverness, Literature)
"Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world."
- John Cheever
(Related: Despair, Literature, Lovers, Salvation, World)
"What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power."
- John Cheever
(Related: Power, Ability, Consciousness, Danger, Literature, Will)
"Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other."
- Anton Chekhov
(Related: Wife, Literature, Medicine, Night)
"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."
- Gilbert K. Chesterton
(Related: Fiction, Literature, Luxury, Necessity)
"The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order."
- Jean Cocteau
(Related: Literature, Order)
"Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature."
- Jean Cocteau
(Related: Effect, Job, Light, Literature, Originality, Rest, Spontaneity, Youth)
"There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind."
- J. M. Coetzee
(Related: Culture, Imitation, Influence, Literature, Mind)
"In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life."
- J. M. Coetzee
(Related: Life, Thought, Virtue, Literature, Occupation, Word, Writer)
"Let philosophy resolutely aim to be as scientific as possible, but let her not forget her strong kinship with literature."
- Morris Raphael Cohen
(Related: Forget, Kinship, Literature, Philosophy)
"Literature and philosophy both allow past idols to be resurrected with a frequency which would be truly distressing to a sober scientist."
- Morris Raphael Cohen
(Related: Idols, Literature, Past, Philosophy)
"Lastly, literature and philosophy both allow past idols to be resurrected with a frequency which would be truly distressing to a sober scientist."
- Morris Raphael Cohen
(Related: Idols, Literature, Past, Philosophy)
"In thus pointing out certain respects in which philosophy resembles literature more than science, I do not mean, of course, to imply that it would be well for philosophy if it ceased to aim at scientific rigor."
- Morris Raphael Cohen
(Related: Science, Literature, Philosophy)
"Again, both literature and philosophy work by appealing to certain reigning idols."
- Morris Raphael Cohen
(Related: Work, Idols, Literature, Philosophy)
"The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(Related: Genius, People, Being, Literature, Wit)
"Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art."
- Barry Commoner
(Related: Art, Environmental, Education, Concern, Journalism, Law, Literature, Medicine, Now, Public)
"Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once."
- Cyril Connolly
(Related: Art, Journalism, Literature, Will, Writing)
"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."
- James Connolly
(Related: People, Inspiration, Literature)
"But picketing - picketing for or against something, and handing out literature - these are conspicuously formal actions. They have to be understood as indirect communication."
- Tony Conrad
(Related: Actions, Communication, Literature)
"The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self."
- Charles Horton Cooley
(Related: Life, Literature, Self, Struggle)
"First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory."
- Mason Cooley
(Related: First, Literary, Literature, Theory)
"I had an older brother who was very interested in literature, so I had an early exposure to literature, and and theater. My father sometimes would work in musical comedies."
- Francis Ford Coppola
(Related: Work, Father, Brother, Literature, Theater)
"As it was, I realized choosing the study of Chinese literature as my life's work was probably a mistake."
- Eric Allin Cornell
(Related: Work, Mistake, Life, Literature, Study)
"What good is a writer if he can't destroy literature? And us... what good are we if we don't help as much as we can in that destruction?"
- Julio Cortazar
(Related: Destruction, Help, Literature, Writer)
"Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth."
- Edward Dahlberg
(Related: Earth, Literature)
"The genre has moved into this commercial aspect of itself, and ignored this extraordinarily rich literature that's filed everywhere else except under travel."
- Robyn Davidson
(Related: Travel, Literature)
"It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics."
- Richard Dawkins
(Related: Science, Boasts, Ignorance, Incompetence, Literature, Mathematics)
"American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World."
- Christopher Dawson
(Related: American, Content, Literature, World)
"When we have spiritual reading at meals, when we have the rosary at night, when we have study groups, forums, when we go out to distribute literature at meetings, or sell it on the street corners, Christ is there with us."
- Dorothy Day
(Related: Christ, Literature, Meetings, Night, Reading, Spiritual, Study)
"If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely."
- Don DeLillo
(Related: Work, Perception, Being, Literature, Writer)
"If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it."
- Andrew Denton
(Related: Music, Art, Earth, Literature, May, Shakespeare)
"In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it."
- Jacques Derrida
(Related: Dream, Language, Literature, Philosophy, Writing)
"When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man's name live for thousands of years."
- Denis Diderot
(Related: Art, Science, Literature, Man, Name, Personality, Philosophy, Years)
"The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write."
- Annie Dillard
(Related: Literature, Will, World, Writer)
"Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience."
- Carl Clinton Van Doren
(Related: Experience, Imagination, Power, Knowledge, Facts, Learning, Literature, Sound)
"Although by 1851 tales of adventure had begun to seem antiquated, they had rendered a large service to the course of literature: they had removed the stigma, for the most part, from the word novel."
- Carl Clinton Van Doren
(Related: Adventure, Service, Word)
"Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor."
- William O. Douglas
(Related: Literature)
"Under adversity, under oppression, the words begin to fail, the easy words begin to fail. In order to convey things accurately, the human being is almost forced to find the most precise words possible, which is a precondition for literature."
- Rita Dove
(Related: Adversity, Being, Literature, Oppression, Order, Words)
"For years, I had heard about the lack of interest in literature in the U.S. and I had complained about it. I failed to understand how people could fail to be moved by art."
- Rita Dove
(Related: Art, People, Interest, Literature, Years)
"Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early."
- Rita Dove
(Related: Poetry, Children, Curriculum, Literature, Talk, Teachers, Trying)
"The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it."
- Elizabeth Drew
(Related: Literature, Reading)
"It is commonly asserted and accepted that Paradise Lost is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement in our literature."
- John Drinkwater
(Related: Achievement, English, Paradise, Literature, May, Poems)
"I didn't choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to the place."
- Helen Dunmore
(Related: Age, History, Culture, Language, Literature, Russia)
"I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate."
- Marguerite Duras
(Related: Journalism, Literature, Word, Workers)
"There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature."
- Lawrence Durrell
(Related: Love, Literature, Woman)
"You get below the Mason-Dixon line and you have some of the best music, culture, the two races, the literature, and it's so rich."
- Robert Duvall
(Related: Music, Culture, Literature)
"I get up at an unholy hour in the morning my work day is completed by the time the sun rises. I have a slightly bad back which has made an enormous contribution to American literature."
- David Eddings
(Related: Time, Work, American, Day, Literature, Sun)
"I was already devouring literature and I was the ripe old age of 15 when I decided to be an actor. I just thought plays were the most fantastic way of expressing life. I thought I'd discovered Shakespeare - 'hey, there's a new guy in town, don't know if anyone's read him.' I was just excited about the whole thing, from day one."
- Chiwetel Ejiofor
(Related: Age, Life, Thought, Actor, Day, Literature, Old, Shakespeare)
"I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics."
- T. S. Eliot
(Related: Politics, Religion, Literature)
"Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature."
- T. S. Eliot
(Related: Literature, Praise, Respect)
"We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion."
- T. S. Eliot
(Related: Religion, Literature)
"I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Sex, American, Force, Influence, Literature, Publishing)
"To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature."
- Ernst Fischer
(Related: Dreams, Duty, Literature, Prosperity, Terror)
"Facts are not science - as the dictionary is not literature."
- Martin H. Fischer
(Related: Science, Facts, Literature)
"People whose understanding and taste in literature, painting, and music are beyond question are, for the most part, ignorant of what is good or bad art in the theater."
- Minnie Maddern Fiske
(Related: Art, Music, People, Literature, Painting, Question, Taste, Theater, Understanding)
"That helped me to keep in touch with myself and to keep in touch with this really quite extraordinary language and literature into which I had pushed a little way."
- Robert Fitzgerald
(Related: Language, Literature)
"I had all the normal interests - I played basketball and I headed the school paper. But I also developed very early a great love for music and literature and the theater."
- Carlisle Floyd
(Related: Love, Music, Basketball, Literature, School, Theater)
"Even before Europe was united in an economic level or was conceived at the level of economic interests and trade, it was culture that united all the countries of Europe. The arts, literature, music are the connecting link of Europe."
- Dario Fo
(Related: Music, Countries, Culture, Europe, Literature, Trade, United)
"You know, 20 years... the films of television when it started, the literature, radio in communist countries, they're clean as a whistle; there was no violence, no sex, no drugs, nothing."
- Milos Forman
(Related: Sex, Countries, Drugs, Literature, Nothing, Television, Violence, Years)
"What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote."
- E. M. Forster
(Related: Literature, Man)
"Reverence is fatal to literature."
- E. M. Forster
(Related: Literature)
"I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into."
- Jonathan Frakes
(Related: American, Baseball, Jazz, Literature, Writers)
"The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government."
- Milton Friedman
(Related: Architecture, Government, Science, Civilization, Agriculture, Literature, Painting)
"I'd probably want to teach at university, because children would drive me insane. I suspect it would be English literature, Shakespeare and so forth. I've always been deeply, deeply in love with that kind of thing."
- Stephen Fry
(Related: Love, Children, English, Literature, Shakespeare, University, Want)
"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."
- Northrop Frye
(Related: Art, Work, Day, Invention, Law, Literature)
"Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance."
- Clifford Geertz
(Related: History, Science, Anthropology, Consciousness, Gender, Literature)
"I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things."
- Clifford Geertz
(Related: Soul, People, Literature)
"I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it."
- Clifford Geertz
(Related: Anthropology, Literature, Research, Writing)
"I attempt to write a good novel. Whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe."
- Elizabeth George
(Related: Literature, Will)
"Exciting literature after supper is not the best digestive."
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman
(Related: Literature)
"Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted."
- Ellen Glasgow
(Related: Life, Literature, Violence)
"As I grew up, I was interested in other areas, too, especially literature. It became a major love of mine. Later, it became a difficult choice for me as to whether to major in music or literature. It wasn't until my 30s that I began a profession in music."
- Tom Glazer
(Related: Love, Music, Choice, Literature, Profession)
"Acquiring a repertoire in these days, when the vocal literature is so immense, so overwhelming, that the student with sense will devote all his energies to work and not imagine himself a martyr to art."
- Alma Gluck
(Related: Art, Work, Literature, Martyr, Sense, Will)
"The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(Related: Literature, Nation)
"Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty."
- Herbert Gold
(Related: Beauty, Truth, Careers, Literature, Living, Meaning, Memories, Nerves, Writers)
"I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing."
- Stephen Greenblatt
(Related: Literature, Nothing, Physics, Pleasure, Worth, Writing)
"Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates."
- Franz Grillparzer
(Related: Work, Poetry, Life, Literature)
"When you read the psychedelic literature, there is a distinction between the so-called natural psychedelics and synthetic psychedelics that are artificially produced."
- Stanislav Grof
(Related: Literature)
"I studied English literature; I took 2 independent religion classes, but I wasn't a religion major really."
- Maggie Gyllenhaal
(Related: Religion, English, Literature)
"Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated."
- Marilyn Hacker
(Related: Literature, states, Study, Theory, United, Writing)
"Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer."
- Mark Haddon
(Related: Science, Answers, Literature, Questions, Will)
"A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can."
- Edith Hamilton
(Related: Quality, People, Knowledge, Day, Literature)
"I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of."
- Dashiell Hammett
(Related: American, Influence, Literature)
"A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate."
- Christopher Hampton
(Related: Life, Belief, Being, Disappointments, Energy, Literature, Result, World)
"Were I more conversant with literature and its great names, I could go on quoting them ad infinitum and acknowledge my debt for the merit you have been generous enough to find in my work."
- Knut Hamsun
(Related: Work, Debt, Literature, Merit, Names)
"The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it."
- Vaclav Havel
(Related: Literature)
"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."
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
(Related: Family, First, Friends, Literature, Writing)
"In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read."
- S. I. Hayakawa
(Related: People, Literature, Sense, Will)
"In a real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish."
- S. I. Hayakawa
(Related: Life, People, Literature, Sense, Will)
"It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese."
- Lafcadio Hearn
(Related: Poetry, Europe, Literature)
"The proverbial philosophy of a people helps us to understand more about them than any other kind of literature."
- Lafcadio Hearn
(Related: People, Literature, Philosophy)
"There are two methods for the literary study of any book - the first being the study of its thought and emotion; the second only that of its workmanship. A student of literature should study some of the Bible from both points of view."
- Lafcadio Hearn
(Related: Thought, Bible, Being, Emotion, First, Literary, Literature, Study)
"It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race."
- Lafcadio Hearn
(Related: Work, Bible, English, Exaggeration, Influence, Language, Literature, Race, Shakespeare, Will)
"Contemporary literature in the West has shown some signs of ethical change."
- Lafcadio Hearn
(Related: Change, Literature)
"For this reason, to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one's literary education very incomplete."
- Lafcadio Hearn
(Related: Education, Knowledge, Bible, English, Literary, Literature, Reason, Study)
"I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry."
- Lafcadio Hearn
(Related: Love, Poetry, English, Fiction, Literature, Passion)
"He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it."
- Joseph Heller
(Related: Literature)
"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."
- Ernest Hemingway
(Related: American, Literature)
"It is not Kafka's fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature."
- Herman Hesse
(Related: People, Ability, Desire, Fault, Literature)
"Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature."
- Herman Hesse
(Related: Letters, Literature)
"I've been missing Japanese literature so much of late."
- Utada Hikaru
(Related: Literature)
"In America, the only truly popular art form is the movies. Most people consider painting a hobby and literature, schoolwork."
- Brad Holland
(Related: Art, Movies, People, America, Literature, Painting, Popular)
"I was guilty of judging capitalism by its operations and socialism by its hopes and aspirations; capitalism by its works and socialism by its literature."
- Sidney Hook
(Related: Aspirations, Capitalism, Literature, Socialism)
"Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions."
- A. E. Housman
(Related: Perception, Discrimination, Literature, Opinions)
"Every man's memory is his private literature."
- Aldous Huxley
(Related: Literature, Man, Memory)
"Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing."
- Thomas Huxley
(Related: Science, Literature)
"Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science."
- Thomas Huxley
(Related: Money, Science, Books, Literature)
"For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page."
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante
(Related: Literature)
"American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter."
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante
(Related: American, Literature, Writing)
"Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art."
- William Ralph Inge
(Related: Art, Literature, Trade)
"I lead no party; I follow no leader. I have given the best part of my life to careful study of Islam, its law and polity, its culture, its history and its literature."
- Muhammad Iqbal
(Related: History, Life, Leader, Islam, Culture, Law, Literature, Party, Study)
"The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible."
- Washington Irving
(Related: Charm, Land, Literature)
"It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature."
- Henry James
(Related: History, Literature)
"I've always loved films, always. I studied literature and I went to Columbia in New York and I went to Paris for part of one year and ended up staying there."
- Jim Jarmusch
(Related: Literature, Paris)
"Literature that keeps employing new linguistic and formal modes of expression to draft a panorama of society as a whole while at the same time exposing it, tearing the masks from its face - for me that would be deserving of an award."
- Elfriede Jelinek
(Related: Society, Time, Draft, Expression, Literature)
"What we value about music and literature are the moments that they create in our minds when we encounter them."
- Stephan Jenkins
(Related: Music, Literature, Moments, Value)
"During half a century of literary work, I have endeavoured to introduce the philosophy of evolution into the sphere of literature, and to inspire my readers to think in evolutionary terms."
- Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
(Related: Work, Evolution, Literary, Literature, Philosophy)
"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."
- Sarah Orne Jewett
(Related: Literature, Mind, Years)
"Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture."
- Juan Ramon Jimenez
(Related: Poetry, Culture, Grace, Literature, State)
"More than art, more than literature, music is universally accessible."
- Billy Joel
(Related: Music, Art, Literature)
"The concept of industry domination of regulatory agencies was well known and documented in the literature by the 1960s."
- Nick Johnson
(Related: Literature)
"When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language."
- James Earl Jones
(Related: Feelings, Thoughts, Ability, Drama, Language, Literature, Mind, Sermons)
"Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way around."
- John K. Van De Kamp
(Related: Life, Sex, Children, Literature)
"This is the most intimate relationship between literature and its readers: they treat the text as a part of themselves, as a possession."
- Ryszard Kapuscinski
(Related: Literature, Possession)
"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."
- Ryszard Kapuscinski
(Related: Literature, Struggle)
"My writing is a combination of three elements. The first is travel: not travel like a tourist, but travel as exploration. The second is reading literature on the subject. The third is reflection."
- Ryszard Kapuscinski
(Related: Travel, Exploration, First, Literature, Reading, Reflection, Writing)
"The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart."
- Ryszard Kapuscinski
(Related: Poetry, Heart, Learning, Literature, Prose, Tradition)
"Well, you sort of get out of the pool room, you get out of the Marine Corps, you get out and read some literature, you become involved with people who also want to know and are ready to share some ideas about literature and thoughts, and it becomes nourished that way."
- Harvey Keitel
(Related: People, Ideas, Thoughts, Literature, Want)
"What fascinated me mostly about Mickey Cohen was that he, in his later years, hired someone to help him to comprehend literature, to help him to read better, to understand words better."
- Harvey Keitel
(Related: Help, Literature, Words, Years)
"Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness."
- Helen Keller
(Related: Embarrassment, Friends, Literature, Senses, Talk, Utopia)
"And I found both literature and the church very dramatic presences in the world of the 1950s."
- Thomas Keneally
(Related: Church, Literature, World)
"One of the greatest gifts my brother and I received from my mother was her love of literature and language. With their boundless energy, libraries open the door to these worlds and so many others. I urge young and old alike to embrace all that libraries have to offer."
- Caroline Kennedy
(Related: Love, Mother, Brother, Energy, Gifts, Language, Libraries, Literature, Old, Open)
"Without a sense of place the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego."
- William Kennedy
(Related: Work, Music, Ego, Literature, Self, Sense)
"I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not nationally known as being a literary family, though my mother and my mother's side of the family in general were interested in literature."
- Kenneth Koch
(Related: Family, Mother, Being, Literary, Literature)
"To those of you who study history, economics, sociology, literature and language I present the challenge of the utilization of the enormous resources in our grasp to the problem of creating a genuinely good life for yourselves and your children."
- Polykarp Kusch
(Related: Life, History, Challenge, Children, Economics, Language, Literature, Present, Study)
"Internationalism on the other hand admits that spiritual achievements have their roots deep in national life; from this national consciousness art and literature derive their character and strength and on it even many of the humanistic sciences are firmly based."
- Christian Lous Lange
(Related: Art, Life, Character, Strength, Consciousness, Deep, Literature, Spiritual)
"And literature frequently rises to heights that make it international."
- Irving Langmuir
(Related: Literature)
"Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature."
- Steig Larsson
(Related: Entertainment, Light, Literature, Propaganda, Question, Writing)
"Naturally I drew register a little exaggerated, in order to create something new in the sense of a sublime literature that sings of despair only in order to oppress the reader, and make him desire the good as the remedy."
- Comte de Lautreamont
(Related: Desire, Despair, Literature, Order, Sense)
"Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep."
- David Herbert Lawrence
(Related: Deep, Literature)
"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!"
- David Herbert Lawrence
(Related: Art, Literature)
"The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine."
- Stephen Leacock
(Related: Music, Class, Literature, Medicine)
"Gossip is more popular than literature."
- Hugh Leonard
(Related: Gossip, Literature, Popular)
"Literature is analysis after the event."
- Doris Lessing
(Related: Literature)
"Comics? Honestly, that's more a matter of nostalgia for me. I think most of that energy has gone to my love of literature and my love of film."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Love, Energy, Film, Literature, Nostalgia)
"Personal experience is the basis of all real Literature."
- George Henry Lewes
(Related: Experience, Literature)
"The object of Literature is to instruct, to animate, or to amuse."
- George Henry Lewes
(Related: Literature)
"Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress."
- George Henry Lewes
(Related: Progress, Cause, Effect, Literature)
"All good Literature rests primarily on insight."
- George Henry Lewes
(Related: Literature)
"Literature delivers tidings of the world within and the world without."
- George Henry Lewes
(Related: Literature, World)
"All bad Literature rests upon imperfect insight, or upon imitation, which may be defined as seeing at second-hand."
- George Henry Lewes
(Related: Imitation, Literature, May)
"It is unhappily true that much insincere Literature and Art, executed solely with a view to effect, does succeed by deceiving the public."
- George Henry Lewes
(Related: Art, Effect, Literature, Public, Succeed)
"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."
- C. S. Lewis
(Related: Art, Truth, Caring, Literature, Man, Originality, Will)
"Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become."
- C. S. Lewis
(Related: Life, Literature, Reality, Respect)
"Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead."
- Sinclair Lewis
(Related: American, Literature)
"The narrative of serial art works more like music than like literature."
- Sol LeWitt
(Related: Art, Music, Literature)
"There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry."
- Gyorgy Ligeti
(Related: Poetry, Literature)
"I lived in a region in the northwestern province - the people there in general have a great love for the Taliban, so I started to read some of the literature of the scholars and the history of the movement. And my heart became attached to them."
- John Walker Lindh
(Related: History, Love, People, Heart, Literature)
"It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have a go and see if I could do it."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Children, Feeling, Interest, Literature)
"I do not believe in sex distinction in literature, law, politics, or trade - or that modesty and virtue are more becoming to women than to men, but wish we had more of it everywhere."
- Belva Lockwood
(Related: Women, Politics, Sex, Virtue, Law, Literature, Modesty, Trade)
"Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round."
- David Lodge
(Related: Life, Sex, Children, Literature)
"The day is past when schools could afford to give sufficient time and attention to the teaching of the ancient languages to enable the student to get that enjoyment out of classical literature that made the lives of our grandfathers so rich."
- James Loeb
(Related: Time, Attention, Day, Enjoyment, Literature, Past, Schools, Teaching)
"It has always seemed to me a pity that the young people of our generation should grow up with such scant knowledge of Greek and Latin literature, its wealth and variety, its freshness and its imperishable quality."
- James Loeb
(Related: Quality, People, Knowledge, Wealth, Literature, Pity, Variety)
"When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen. But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can."
- Samuel Lover
(Related: Cure, Literature, Man, Nothing, Pen)
"In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern."
- Amy Lowell
(Related: Science, Literature)
"The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn... tired of common sense and civilization."
- F. L. Lucas
(Related: Nature, Art, Men, Civilization, Common sense, Literature, World)
"Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left."
- Robert Lynd
(Related: History, Poetry, Drama, Fiction, Literature, Quarrels, Will)
"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."
- Mary MacLane
(Related: Literature, World)
"I just happen to like the work. I like preparing for a role. I like reading. I like analyzing. I like literature. I like emotions. I like working with other actors."
- Elle Macpherson
(Related: Work, Actors, Emotions, Literature, Reading)
"Without literature my life would be miserable."
- Naguib Mahfouz
(Related: Life, Literature)
"The Arab world also won the Nobel with me. I believe that international doors have opened, and that from now on, literate people will consider Arab literature also. We deserve that recognition."
- Naguib Mahfouz
(Related: People, Literature, Now, Will, World)
"The Nobel Prize has given me, for the first time in my life, the feeling that my literature could be appreciated on an international level."
- Naguib Mahfouz
(Related: Time, Life, Feeling, First, Literature)
"I didn't make any money from my writing until much later. I published about 80 stories for nothing. I spent on literature."
- Naguib Mahfouz
(Related: Money, Literature, Nothing, Writing)
"And Marx spoke of the fact that socialism will be the kingdom of freedom, where man realizes himself in a way that humankind has never seen before. This was an inspiring body of literature to read."
- Albert Maltz
(Related: Body, Fact, Freedom, Inspiring, Literature, Man, Socialism, Will)
"Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being."
- Paul de Man
(Related: Time, Truth, Being, Error, Literature)
"Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form."
- Thomas Mann
(Related: Instinct, Literature, Suffering)
"Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood."
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
(Related: Literature, Nothing, Reality, Wood)
"The crown of literature is poetry."
- W. Somerset Maugham
(Related: Poetry, Literature)
"What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature."
- W. Somerset Maugham
(Related: Life, Brothers, Literature, Now)
"In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others."
- Andre Maurois
(Related: Love, Literature)
"I also really liked playing Mr. Tumnus in 'Narnia'. I got to play my favorite character in children's literature, which I loved. You don't get the chance to do that in other jobs."
- James McAvoy
(Related: Character, Chance, Children, Favorite, Jobs, Literature, Play)
"To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is."
- David McCullough
(Related: Art, Experience, History, Music, Being, Literature, Pleasure, Responsibility)
"Jesus claimed He had the power to raise himself from the dead and His followers would be raised from the dead. That's a unique claim in the literature of religion."
- Josh McDowell
(Related: Power, Religion, Followers, Literature)
"I wanted the press to become something of a movement. Not a movement committed to a particular "ism," but a gathering together of writers with an aesthetic approach to literature and with a lust for excellence."
- John Metcalf
(Related: Excellence, Literature, Lust, Press, Writers)
"Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself."
- Henry Miller
(Related: Life, Music, People, Forget, Interest, Literature, World)
"Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself."
- Henry Miller
(Related: Life, Music, People, Forget, Interest, Literature, World)
"What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature."
- Henry Miller
(Related: Literature, Open)
"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."
- Jonathan Miller
(Related: Literature)
"When I entered college, it was to study liberal arts. At the University of Pennsylvania, I studied English literature, but I fell in love with broadcasting, with telling stories about other people's exploits."
- Andrea Mitchell
(Related: Love, People, College, English, Liberal, Literature, Study, University)
"Literature precedes genre."
- Rick Moody
(Related: Literature)
"Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions."
- John Morley
(Related: Literature)
"Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form."
- Toni Morrison
(Related: Art, Literature, Tolerance)
"The elegance and the quality - the talent is always in the literature. I start with the word and I base everything on that. It doesn't make any difference to me."
- Kate Mulgrew
(Related: Quality, Talent, Difference, Elegance, Literature, Word)
"Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions."
- Iris Murdoch
(Related: Emotions, Literature)
"It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history."
- Gilbert Murray
(Related: History, Truth, Literature)
"Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading."
- Gilbert Murray
(Related: Literature, Reading)
"There are even more statues of Robert Burns than of any other figure in world literature. Indeed if we discount figures of religion, then only Christopher Columbus has more statues than he worldwide."
- Len G. Murray
(Related: Religion, Columbus, Literature, World)
"A particularly fine head on a man usually means that he is stupid; particularly deep philosophers are usually shallow thinkers; in literature, talents not much above the average are usually regarded by their contemporaries as geniuses."
- Robert Musil
(Related: Deep, Literature, Man)
"Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Butterflies, Literature, Man)
"There is only one school of literature - that of talent."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Talent, Literature, School)
"Although there is a very large literature, still growing almost daily, on the Chinese calendar, its interest is, we suggest, much more archaeological and historical than scientific."
- Joseph Needham
(Related: Interest, Literature)
"We're not in love with Literature all the time - especially when you have to teach it every day."
- Howard Nemerov
(Related: Love, Time, Day, Literature)
"A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature."
- John Henry Newman
(Related: Literature, Memory, Mind)
"Life has obliged him to remember so much useful knowledge that he has lost not only his history, but his whole original cargo of useless knowledge; history, languages, literatures, the higher mathematics, or what you will - are all gone."
- Albert J. Nock
(Related: Life, History, Knowledge, Mathematics, Will)
"A great speech is literature."
- Peggy Noonan
(Related: Literature, Speech)
"Practically every movie that shows the pope or even a bishop as a character, and in much of western literature of the last 300 or 400 years, these are portrayed as awful figures."
- Michael Novak
(Related: Character, Literature, Years)
"Examples one finds in the philosophical literature are somebody who's seen the trial of a child of theirs, where they're being proved guilty of some crime that would drive the parent into a depression, maybe a suicidal depression."
- Robert Nozick
(Related: Being, Crime, Depression, Literature)
"What hadn't been realized in the literature until now is that merely to describe how severely something has been tested in the past itself embodies inductive assumptions, even as a statement about the past."
- Robert Nozick
(Related: Literature, Now, Past)
"In my teens, I developed a passionate idolatry for a teacher of English literature. I wanted to do something that he would approve of more, so I thought I should be some sort of a scholar."
- Trevor Nunn
(Related: Thought, English, Literature)
"A lot of performing instincts are involved in the business of direction, but so is analysis and having a sense of literature."
- Trevor Nunn
(Related: Business, Direction, Literature, Sense)
"I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large."
- Kenzaburo Oe
(Related: Literature, World, Writers)
"I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare."
- Ben Okri
(Related: Home, Literature, London, Shakespeare)
"During our stay in London for the first time I was able to establish personal contact with some of the organic chemists, whose work I knew and admired from the literature. I found them most gracious and helpful."
- George Andrew Olah
(Related: Time, Work, First, Literature, London)
"On almost anything someone does in the computer business, you can go back in the literature and prove someone had done it earlier."
- Ken Olsen
(Related: Business, Computer, Literature)
"The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature."
- George Orwell
(Related: Literature, Prose)
"Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary."
- Boris Pasternak
(Related: Art, People, Literature, Saying, Words)
"There are, it is true, at present no great prizes in literature such as are offered by the learned professions, but there are quite as many small ones - competences; while, on the other hand, it is not so much of a lottery."
- James Payn
(Related: Literature, Present, Prizes)
"The idea of bringing young people up to Literature is doubtless calculated to raise the eyebrows almost as much as the suggestion of bringing them up to the Stage."
- James Payn
(Related: People, Idea, Literature)
"Cultivating literature as I do upon a little oatmeal, and driving, when in a position to be driven at all, in that humble vehicle, the 'bus, I have had, perhaps, exceptional opportunities for observing their mutual position and behaviour; and it is very peculiar."
- James Payn
(Related: Driving, Literature)
"In all highly civilised communities Pretence is prominent, and sooner or later invades the regions of Literature."
- James Payn
(Related: Literature)
"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."
- Octavio Paz
(Related: History, Nature, Expression, Feeling, Language, Literature, Sense, Silence)
"I think I was a good student, because I jumped over a school. My main interest was basically history and literature. Sports were basically basketball and swimming at a pool. I was so happy."
- Shimon Peres
(Related: History, Sports, Basketball, Interest, Literature, School)
"He taught me literature, and he actually taught me how to read. He was my personal mentor."
- Shimon Peres
(Related: Literature)
"Well, the oil, the oil spot, if you will, is a, is a term in counterinsurgency literature that connotes a peaceful area, secure area. So what you're trying to do is to always extend that, to push that out."
- David Petraeus
(Related: Literature, Oil, Trying, Will)
"Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language."
- Steven Pinker
(Related: Art, Music, Poetry, Language, Literature, Mind, Painting, Sculpture)
"My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method."
- Frederik Pohl
(Related: Science, English, Fiction, Literature, Old)
"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."
- Ezra Pound
(Related: Ability, Literature, Writers)
"Literature is news that stays news."
- Ezra Pound
(Related: Literature, News)
"A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations."
- Ezra Pound
(Related: Age, Literature)
"Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree."
- Ezra Pound
(Related: Language, Literature, Meaning)
"If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays."
- Ezra Pound
(Related: Literature, Nation)
"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."
- Jerry Pournelle
(Related: Literary, Literature)
"To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength."
- Lawrence Clark Powell
(Related: Strength, Vision, Literature, Needs, Writer)
"I didn't choose literature. Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Decision, Literature)
"Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There's an objective and a subjective camera, like there's a third- and a first-person narrator in literature."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: First, Literature)
"Tardiness in literature can make me nervous."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Literature, Tardiness)
"I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!"
- Philip Pullman
(Related: Education, English, Importance, Literature, Reading, Years)
"It seems to me that an author who has determined very new domains in literature is Gertrude Stein."
- Raymond Queneau
(Related: Literature)
"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."
- Ted Rall
(Related: Literature, Prose)
"Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature."
- Paul Ricoeur
(Related: Wisdom, Expression, Literary, Literature)
"We shall suffer no attachment to literature, no taste for abstract discussion, no love of purely intellectual theories, to seduce us from our devotion to the cause of the oppressed, the down trodden, the insulted and injured masses of our fellow men."
- George Ripley
(Related: Love, Men, Cause, Devotion, Literature, Taste, Theories)
"The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself."
- Jim Rohn
(Related: Truth, People, Fiction, Literature, Reason, Study)
"The literature of women's lives is a tradition of escapees, women who have lived to tell the tale."
- Phyllis Rose
(Related: Women, Literature, Tradition)
"Wherever you look there are inspirations, books, literature, paintings, landscapes, everything. Just living is an inspiration."
- Gavin Rossdale
(Related: Inspiration, Books, Literature, Living)
"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."
- Francoise Sagan
(Related: Art, Life, Illusion, Literature)
"One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name."
- George Saintsbury
(Related: History, Absence, Facts, Fiction, Literary, Literature, Name, Prose)
"Journalism students need to understand it and need a solid background in the liberal arts, in sociology, economics, literature and language, because they won't get it later on."
- Harrison Salisbury
(Related: Economics, Journalism, Language, Liberal, Literature, Students)
"When I was young my Father used to tell me that the two most worthwhile pursuits in life were the pursuit of truth and of beauty and I believe that Alfred Nobel must have felt much the same when he gave these prizes for literature and the sciences."
- Frederick Sanger
(Related: Beauty, Life, Father, Truth, Literature, Prizes, Pursuit)
"The Bible is literature, not dogma."
- George Santayana
(Related: Bible, Literature)
"I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are."
- Jose Saramago
(Related: Cliches, Doubt, Heroes, Literary, Literature, Uncertainty)
"Without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer."
- Jose Saramago
(Related: Time, Possibility, Job, Worth, Writer)
"Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It's endless. I'm sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds."
- Nathalie Sarraute
(Related: Literature, Trying, Universe, Will, Writers)
"If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble."
- Jean-Paul Sartre
(Related: Literature, Trouble, Worth)
"Literature is the immortality of speech."
- August Wilhelm von Schlegel
(Related: Immortality, Literature, Speech)
"When you kill somebody in the movies, it matters, whereas in literature it can be allegorical."
- Barbet Schroeder
(Related: Movies, Literature)
"Here, you can walk into a bookstore and pick up a Bible or Christian literature and learn. Over there, they are lucky if they have one Bible for a whole village."
- Michael Scott
(Related: Christian, Bible, Literature)
"A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect."
- Walter Scott
(Related: History, Knowledge, Literature, May)
"The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives."
- W. G. Sebald
(Related: Chance, Literature, Memory, Mind, Question)
"Movies are a complicated collision of literature, theatre, music and all the visual arts."
- Yahoo Serious
(Related: Movies, Music, Literature, Theatre)
"Pop changes week to week, month to month. But great music is like literature."
- Ravi Shankar
(Related: Music, Literature)
"If I could have gone on describing to you the beauties of this region, who knows but I might have made a fine addition to the literature of our age?"
- Robert Gould Shaw
(Related: Age, Literature)
"The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance."
- Isaac Bashevis Singer
(Related: Life, War, Death, Emotion, Emotions, Intellect, Literature, Silly)
"I think the great artists, especially in literature, have always thought with the heart."
- Douglas Sirk
(Related: Thought, Heart, Artists, Literature)
"Lovers of literature will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism."
- Josef Skvorecky
(Related: Criticism, Literature, Lovers, Sea, Shipwreck, Treasure, Will)
"I gradually became persuaded that the subjects, without intending to, had revealed to me a basic truth about markets that was foreign to the literature of economics."
- Vernon L. Smith
(Related: Truth, Economics, Literature)
"Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory."
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
(Related: Heart, Force, Freedom, Literature, Memory, Nation, Press)
"I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever."
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
(Related: Education, Affectation, Literature, Will, World)
"Literature becomes the living memory of a nation."
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
(Related: Literature, Living, Memory, Nation)
"Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation."
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
(Related: Experience, Literature, Living, Memory, Nation)
"The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature."
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
(Related: Art, Experience, Literature)
"Bobby Fischer has an enormous knowledge of chess and his familiarity with the chess literature of the USSR is immense."
- Boris Spassky
(Related: Knowledge, Chess, Familiarity, Literature)
"I studied literature design and fashion design."
- Danielle Steel
(Related: Design, Fashion, Literature)
"Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable."
- Gertrude Stein
(Related: Sex, Literature)
"Hemingway's remarks are not literature."
- Gertrude Stein
(Related: Literature)
"The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it."
- Gertrude Stein
(Related: Art, People, Difference, Literature)
"Remarks are not literature."
- Gertrude Stein
(Related: Literature)
"I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."
- John Steinbeck
(Related: Dedication, Literature, Man, Writer)
"Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility."
- Wallace Stevens
(Related: American, Americans, English, Literature, Nothing, Sensibility)
"As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible."
- Wallace Stevens
(Related: Life, Literature)
"I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art."
- Anne Stevenson
(Related: Art, Science, Criticism, Help, Jargon, Literary, Literature)
"I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature."
- Anne Stevenson
(Related: Music, Literature, Shakespeare)
"The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish."
- Robert Louis Stevenson
(Related: Difficulty, Literature)
"The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature."
- Robert Louis Stevenson
(Related: Art, Literature, Style)
"There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer for them, or turn them into literature."
- Stephen Stills
(Related: Love, Men, Literature)
"The amateur is very rare in French literature - as rare as he is common in our own."
- Lytton Strachey
(Related: Literature)
"English dramatic literature is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare; and it is almost inevitable that an English reader should measure the value of other poetic drama by the standards which Shakespeare has already implanted in his mind."
- Lytton Strachey
(Related: Drama, English, Literature, Measure, Mind, Shakespeare, Value)
"How far the existence of the Academy has influenced French literature, either for good or for evil, is an extremely dubious question."
- Lytton Strachey
(Related: Evil, Existence, Literature, Question)
"In pure literature, the writers of the eighteenth century achieved, indeed, many triumphs; but their great, their peculiar, triumphs were in the domain of thought."
- Lytton Strachey
(Related: Thought, Literature, Writers)
"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."
- Lytton Strachey
(Related: EnglFrance, Glory, Italy, Literature, Shakespeare, Spain)
"Film is our literature, so we should tell stories that are apropos of our culture, in that we can learn something about ourselves."
- David Strathairn
(Related: Culture, Film, Literature)
"I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature."
- Jacqueline Susann
(Related: Literature)
"Take the time to discover how African-Americans have had a great impact on this country. In science, education, literature, art, and politics."
- Lynn Swann
(Related: Politics, Time, Art, Education, Science, African, Country, Literature)
"Literature for me isn't a workaday job, but something which involves desires, dreams and fantasy."
- Antonio Tabucchi
(Related: Dreams, Fantasy, Job, Literature)
"Literature is my life of course, but from an ontological point of view. From an existential point of view, I like being a teacher."
- Antonio Tabucchi
(Related: Life, Being, Literature)
"It's interesting to note that all revolutionary literature was written by pastors. These guys were involved in a revolution against the mightiest power that the world had ever seen."
- Randall Terry
(Related: Power, Revolution, Literature, World)
"I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of my job, but increasingly I found myself reading things that weren't really relevant to my academic work, but were relevant to gardening."
- Ken Thompson
(Related: Gardening, Work, Job, Literature, Reading)
"How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions?"
- Polly Toynbee
(Related: Art, History, Culture, Literature, Sense, World)
"The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive."
- Lionel Trilling
(Related: Society, Authority, Culture, Literature, Quarrel, Self, Sense)
"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill."
- Barbara Tuchman
(Related: History, Science, Thought, Civilization, Books, Dumb, Literature)
"Postmodernism cost literature its audience."
- Scott Turow
(Related: Literature)
"The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors."
- Tristan Tzara
(Related: Future, Guidance, Literature, Rest)
"Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature."
- Paul Valery
(Related: Science, Successful, Literature, Rest)
"Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made."
- Gore Vidal
(Related: Time, Virtue, Literature, World, Writers)
"The study of social progress is today not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart."
- Alfred de Vigny
(Related: Heart, Progress, Literature, Study, Today)
"Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction."
- Joan D. Vinge
(Related: Science, Fantasy, Fiction, Literature, Reading, Variety)
"Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past."
- Andrzej Wajda
(Related: Language, Literature, Past, Want)
"In the same period, Polish literature also underwent some significant changes. From social-political literature, which had a great tradition and strong motivation to be that way, Polish literature changed its focus to a psychological rather than a social one."
- Andrzej Wajda
(Related: Motivation, Focus, Literature, Tradition)
"Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science."
- Larry Wall
(Related: Music, Science, Architecture, Computer, Literature, Post)
"I never wanted to become an actress because I'd read great literature or seen great Shakespeare. It was more just wanting to understand what the people were really like, why they said all the strange things they did."
- Julie Walters
(Related: People, Literature, Shakespeare)
"If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside."
- Evelyn Waugh
(Related: Being, Country, Literature)
"Our literature is in great shape."
- James Welch
(Related: Literature)
"The establishment, the newspapers, they try to create something called Scottish literature, but when people are actually going to write, they are not going to necessarily prescribe to that, they'll write what they feel."
- Irvine Welsh
(Related: People, Literature, Newspapers)
"There's all this stuff that is happening in Edinburgh now, it's a sad attempt to create an Edinburgh society, similar to a London society, a highbrow literature celebrity society."
- Irvine Welsh
(Related: Society, Celebrity, Literature, London, Now)
"It's different in Scotland. People who come to readings are more interested in literature as such, but the readership in general is really quite diverse. It's a cliche, but it's said that people who read my books don't read any other books, and you do get that element."
- Irvine Welsh
(Related: People, Books, Literature, Scotland)
"I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens."
- E. B. White
(Related: Literature)
"In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at King's, especially the discovery of French and German literature."
- Patrick White
(Related: Life, Discovery, Fact, Literature)
"It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression."
- Alfred North Whitehead
(Related: Expression, Humanity, Literature)
"The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature."
- Alfred North Whitehead
(Related: Humor, Bible, Absence, Literature)
"The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read."
- Oscar Wilde
(Related: Difference, Journalism, Literature)
"Literature is the orchestration of platitudes."
- Thornton Wilder
(Related: Literature)
"Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science."
- Walter Jon Williams
(Related: Science, History, Poetry, Biography, Fiction, Literature, Philosophy, Want)
"There have been a number of us working very, very hard to bring myth and fairy tales into public consciousness, through fantasy literature and other media. I hope we're succeeding in some small way."
- Terri Windling
(Related: Hope, Consciousness, Fantasy, Literature, Media, Myth, Public)
"Magic Realism is not new. The label's new, the specific Latin American form of it is new, its modern popularity is new, but it's been around as long as literature has been around."
- Terri Windling
(Related: American, Literature, Magic, Popularity, Realism)
"Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing."
- Tobias Wolff
(Related: People, Feelings, Literature, Teaching, Writing)
"I was editing Canadian Literature. I didn't want to let Canadian Literature go, so they reached a nice compromise by which I received half a professor's salary."
- George Woodcock
(Related: Compromise, Literature, Want)
"This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant."
- Virginia Woolf
(Related: Literature, Shakespeare, Writing)
"It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others."
- Virginia Woolf
(Related: Men, Nature, Artist, Literature, Mind, Opinions, Reason)
"Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others."
- Virginia Woolf
(Related: Men, Literature, Opinions, Reason)
"Judaism has always been a strong interest of mine. My two sons speak Hebrew and are familiar with the scriptures and with rabbinic literature. This is the way we live."
- Herman Wouk
(Related: Interest, Judaism, Literature, Sons)
"Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature."
- Gao Xingjian
(Related: Literature)
"In the history of literature there are many great enduring works which were not published in the lifetimes of the authors. If the authors had not achieved self-affirmation while writing, how could they have continued to write?"
- Gao Xingjian
(Related: History, Literature, Self, Writing)
"Intimate relationships are a gold mine for literature to explore, to understand, to describe."
- A. B. Yehoshua
(Related: Gold, Literature, Relationships)
"Literature has to serve as a moral control of politics."
- Yevgeny Yevtushenko
(Related: Politics, Control, Literature)
"As society diversifies, the number of people who read literature is decreasing. It will be difficult for readers to digest my ideas through literature."
- Cao Yu
(Related: Society, People, Ideas, Literature, Will)
"There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause."
- Mao Zedong
(Related: Art, Politics, Cause, Fact, Literature)