Literature Quotes · Page 49

I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.

— P. D. James

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

The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.

— Daniel J. Boorstin

The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything

— Aldous Huxley

The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.

— Donald Barthelme

The excellence of a thing is related to its proper function.

— Aristotle

My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads.

— Charles Baxter

Literature is not a sack race. There aren't real winners and losers in the Republic of Letters.

— Charles Baxter

Nothing in this life is certain aside from death, taxes and English literature graduates writing in the Guardian and spoiling your enjoyment…

— Ash Sarkar

The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that…

— Robert Louis Stevenson

You don't ever want to say to a young person, You can't, or, You are no good. Some people might be able…

— Chinua Achebe

Writers themselves benefit from all helpful information about their task and methods. Readers, in turn, can have both their understanding and appreciation…

— Leland Ryken

The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so…

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Sentimental poetry differs from naive poetry in that it relates the real state at which the latter stops to ideas and applies…

— Friedrich Schiller

In mainstream literature, a trope is a figure of speech: metaphor, simile, irony, or the like. Words used other than literally. In…

— Edward M. Lerner

“Writing is about taking everyday observations, things which people see almost every day of their lives, and yet bringing it to their…

— Jamie L. Harding

I began to think that the finest modern writer was the screen actor. This was in the spirit of the Fifties where…

— Jack Nicholson

I thought in 1965 that my job was to convince most Americans to be against the war. So I spent summers knocking…

— Bill Ayers

“Literature might be called the art of story, and story might in turn be called a universal language, for every culture we…

— Andrea A. Lunsford

Graphic novels are not traditional literature, but that does not mean they are second-rate. Images are a way of writing. When you…

— Marjane Satrapi

The Germans have an inhuman way of cutting up their verbs. Now a verb has a hard time enough of it in…

— Mark Twain

Good poetry does undoubtedly tend to form the soul and character; it tends to beget a love of beauty and of truth…

— Matthew Arnold

Art begins where technique ends. There can be no real art development before one's technique is firmly established. And a great deal…

— Leopold Auer

“It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and…

— Christopher Hitchens

I don't write poems to melt your heart. I write them, so our hearts can melt together.

— Subhan Zein

“I lose faith in mathematics, logical and rigid. What with those that even zero doesn’t accept?”

— Dejan Stojanovic

The real world is cruel, but in the comfort of literature it can bring some light.

— Jeremy Limn

Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.

— William O. Douglas

Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.

— William Ralph Inge

“A child's imagination can be found in the heart of a good book.”

— K. Lamb

Like Guitar in Son of Solomon, and Son in Tar Baby, he believed that harmony could never exist between the races.

— Toni Morrison

Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of…

— Paul de Man

Reality is not an inspiration for literature. At its best, literature is an inspiration for reality.

— Romain Gary

There can be no freedom in art and literature where the government determines who shall create them.

— Ludwig von Mises

An essay is a work of literary art which has a minimum of one anecdote and one universal idea.

— Carol Bly

There's certainly a large literature around baseball in the U.S.

— Chad Harbach

The book of the Psalms, which is the primary devotional literature of the whole Bible, is full of complaints.

— David Augsburger

The literature of the world has exerted its power by being translated.

— Mark Van Doren

Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art.

— Henry David Thoreau

The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.

— Virginia Woolf