Quotes
Quotes about Literature
The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.
Literature is mostly about sex and not much about having children; and life is the other way around.
In literature as in love we are astounded by what is chosen by others.
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Literature was formerly an art and finance a trade; today it is the reverse.
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
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? - Nobel Lecture 2000.
English literature is a kind of training in social ethics. English trains you to handle a body of information in a way that is conducive to action.
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.
Literature is a power to be possessed, not a body of objects to be studied.
Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough of literature.
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.
When a man can observe himself suffering and is able, later, to describe what he's gone through, it means he was born for literature.
A great literature is chiefly the product of inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.
All literature is political.
The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
Only the more rugged mortals should attempt to keep up with current literature.
Every man's memory is his private literature.
There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer for them, or turn them into literature.
How can we speak of right and justice if we take an innocent creature and shed its blood? How can we pray to God for mercy if we ourselves have no mercy? Nobel laureate in literature.
Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.
It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.
Take the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or beauty or form, we are borrowers.
Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.
Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.
