Literature Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Lawrence Clark Powell

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

If you are to reach masses of people in this world, you must do it by a sign language. Whether your vehicle be commerce, literature, or politics, you can do nothing but raise signals, and make motions to the people.

John Jay Chapman

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.

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

That great Cham of literature, Samuel Johnson.

Tobias Smollett

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?

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

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

Spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature's joke, and therefore literature's. True prudence limits this sensualism by admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay. Somehow or other, by dint of labor or bounty of nature, or both combined, the essay must be pure — pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.

When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance, it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball.

Raymond Chandler

James Cain - faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naix, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way.

Raymond Chandler

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

George Bernard Shaw

The general history of art and literature shows that the highest achievements of the human mind are, as a rule, not favourably received at first.

Arthur Schopenhauer

If we want to be sincere, we must admit that there is a well-nourished love and an ill-nourished love. And the rest is literature.

The creation by word-power of something out of nothing—what is that but magic? And, may I add, what is that but literature?

If, therefore, nonsense is really to be the literature of the future, it must have its own version of the Cosmos to offer; the world must not only be tragic, romantic, and religious, it must be nonsensical also.

G. K. Chesterton

English literature is a glorious inheritance which is open to all - there are no barriers, no coupons, and no restrictions. In the English language and in its great writers there are great riches and treasures, of which, of course, the Bible and Shakespeare stand along on the highest platform.

Winston Churchill

In the past, the virtue of women's writing often lay in its divine spontaneity … But it was also, and much more often, chattering and garrulous … In future, granted time and books and a little space in the house for herself, literature will become for women, as for men, an art to be studied. Women's gift will be trained and strengthened. The novel will cease to be the dumping-ground for the personal emotions. It will become, more than at present, a work of art like any other, and its resources and its limitations will be explored.