Quotes
Quotes about Literature
Literature is all, or mostly, about sex
Literature may be defined as words working very hard
LITERATURE IS RECOGNIZABLE THROUGH ITS CAPACITY TO EVOKE MORE THAN IT SAYS
This is what literature is meant to be--exploration without fear
Literature is an epiphenomenon of the action of the flesh
It is literature that counts. You embrace a kind of martyrdom to write what you have to write
Do you insist that a painter have a degree in painting before he starts to paint? Should Shakespeare have had a degree in dramatic literature?
I've a sense of responsibility to literature, pretentious as that must sound
I call literature verbal communication
Journalism is literature in a hurry.
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the sense shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
I have a passion for ballad. . . . They are the gypsy children of song, born under green hedgerows in the leafy lanes and bypaths of literature,--in the genial Summertime.
In literature, as in love, we are astonished at the choice made by other people.
More than any other religion or, indeed, than any other element in human experience, Christianity has made for the intellectual advance of man in reducing languages to writing, creating literatures, promoting education from primary grades through institutions of university level, and stimulating the human mind and spirit to fresh explorations into the unknown. It has been the largest single factor in combating, on a world-wide scale, such ancient foes of man as war, famine, and the exploitation of one race by another. More than any other religion, it has made for the dignity of human personality. This it has done by a power inherent within it of lifting lives from selfishness, spiritual mediocrity, and moral defeat and disintegration, to unselfish achievement and contagious moral and spiritual power and by the high value which it set upon every human soul through the possibilities which it held out of endless growth in fellowship with the eternal God.
This is great literature and great religious literature, this collection of ancient writings we call the Bible, and any translator has a deep sense of responsibility as he undertakes to transmit it to modern readers. He desires his transcript to be faithful to the meaning of the original, so far as he can reach that meaning, and also to do some justice to its literary qualities. But he is well aware that his aim often exceeds his grasp. Translation may be a fascinating task, yet no discipline is more humbling. You may be translating oracles, but soon you learn the risk and folly of posing as an oracle yourself. If your readers are dissatisfied at any point, they may be sure that the translator is still more dissatisfied, if not there, then elsewhereâall the more so, because, in the nature of the case, he has always to appear dogmatic in print.
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.
Joy is but the sign that creative emotion is fulfilling its purpose. - What Is Literature?
You know who critics are?--the men who have failed in literature and art.
I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.
If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can't do this.âSpencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M Post-It Notepads.
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
A man can be a hero if he is a scientist, or a soldier, or a drug addict, or a disc jockey, or a crummy mediocre politician. A man can be a hero because he suffers and despairs; or because he thinks logically and analytically; or because he is "sensitive;" or because he is cruel. Wealth establishes a man as a hero, and so does poverty. Virtually any circumstance in a man's life will make him a hero to some group of people and has a mythic rendering in the cultureâin literature, art, theater, or the daily newspapers.
We . . . are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence.
Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.
