Literature Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

Anton Chekhov

Jean Cocteau

Mao Zedong

Ezra Pound

Nelson Algren

Roland Barthes

Hugh Blair

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.

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of 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.

I feel more confident and more satisfied when I reflect that I have two professions and not one. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other. Though it's disorderly it's not so dull, and besides, neither really loses anything, through my infidelity.

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

Thornton Wilder

Quoting, like smoking…is a dirty habit to which I am devoted. But then…I am a professor of English literature; it is an occupational hazard.

Carolyn Heilbrun

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.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once, and they require separate techniques.

Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.

Variant translation: Music is the literature of the heart, it takes up communication where words stop.

Alphonse de Lamartine

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.

Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.

To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.

Lawrence Clark Powell

All bad Literature rests upon imperfect insight, or upon imitation, which may be defined as seeing at second-hand.

George Henry Lewes

The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

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 Cortázar

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.

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.

We come after. We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning. To say that he has read them without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant. In what way does this knowledge bear on literature and society, on the hope, grown almost axiomatic from the time of Plato to that of Matthew Arnold, that culture is a humanizing force, that the energies of spirit are transferable to those of conduct?

A copy of Dante's Purgatorio excited his especial disgust. "French, eh?" he said. "I guessed as much, and pretty dirty too, I shouldn't wonder. Now just you wait while I look up these here books"—how he said it!—"in my list. Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside."

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.

When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen.

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

Elizabeth A. Drew

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing — by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature.