Literature Quotes · Page 65

a good deal of childhood is strong stuff for adults and totally unsuitable for children.

— Philippa Pearce

Literature for me isn't a workaday job, but something which involves desires, dreams and fantasy.

— Antonio Tabucchi

Literature doesn't matter! The only thing that matters is money and getting your teeth fixed!

— Delmore Schwartz

The literature of impotence is about to develop beyond measure.

— Julien Torma

Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.

— William Stafford

I have grown up in a family where cinema, literature and music are highly valued.

— Shweta Basu Prasad

There is no born lover, there is no born Don Juan, for we are all lovers.

— Dejan Stojanovic

As it was, I realized choosing the study of Chinese literature as my life's work was probably a mistake.

— Eric Allin Cornell

I believe we need literature, which, by allowing us to experience more fully, to imagine more fully, enables us to live more…

— Phyllis Rose

I am always coming up with architectural metaphors when I think about writing. But I think one of the things that draw…

— Nicole Krauss

Greek mathematics is the real thing. The Greeks first spoke a language which modern mathematicians can understand... So Greek mathematics is 'permanent',…

— G. H. Hardy

Comedy keeps the heart sweet; but we all know that there is wholesome refreshment for both mind and heart in an occasional…

— Mark Twain

I don't want to take up literature in a money-making spirit, or be very anxious about making large profits, but selling it…

— Lewis Carroll

I agree that one can't dispense with the reins and the whip altogether, for knaves find their way even into literature, but…

— Anton Chekhov

It's harder to get hold of the world. It's harder to understand the world, to encompass the literature necessary for the information.

— Frederick Busch

To transform a grimace into a sound sounds impossible, yet it is possible to transform a vision into music, to go outside…

— Dejan Stojanovic

Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress. It deepens our natural sensibilities, and strengthens by exercise our…

— George Henry Lewes

Scientific practice is above all a story-telling practice. ... Biology is inherently historical, and its form of discourse is inherently narrative. ...…

— Donna J. Haraway

We shall suffer no attachment to literature, no taste for abstract discussion, no love of purely intellectual theories, to seduce us from…

— George Ripley

I studied Comparative Literature at Cornell. Structuralism was real big then. The idea of reading and writing as being this language game.…

— William T. Vollmann

I'm being provided with some emotional ballast by giving me an intimate portrait of one character in particular in contrast to the…

— Joshua Ferris

The reason for writing that essay was less a personal agenda than an attempt to explain my unease with the general label…

— Sasa Stanisic

“Is not literature meant to speak of our being a thousand different kinds of things, at times creating even this diversity? If…

— Peter Esterhazy

“We've inherited many ideas about writing that emerged in the eighteenth century, especially an interest in literature as both an expression and…

— James Shapiro

“It’s only literature, I know, but it does something, or at least it says something.”

— Alaa Alghamdi

I go to books and to nature as the bee goes to a flower, for a nectar that I can make into…

— John Burroughs

Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by friction.

— Heinrich Heine

Politics is marginal, but literature moves along by indirection.

— Italo Calvino

If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.

— Sven Birkerts

Truth is hard-hearted and unrelenting, too clear, precise; a lie is much more imaginative.

— Dejan Stojanovic

Shirley Jackson's writings are a must for aficionados of the gothic and of good literature.

— Carlos Ruiz Zafon

“If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?”

— Anonymous

Poetry should describe itself, and always be simultaneously poetry and the poetry of poetry.

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

If the public likes you, you're good. Shakespeare was a common, down-to-earth writer in his day.

— Mickey Spillane

It is the glorious doom of literature that the evil perishes and the good remains.

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.

— Antonin Artaud

I majored in the history and literature of Russia and Britain. It has not helped my career.

— Colin Jost

I was much more interested in literature than I was in art. I just got into art by mistake.

— Peggy Guggenheim

Literature is so common a luxury that the age has grown fastidious.

— Henry Theodore Tuckerman

“Literature is not an instruction manual. For obvious reasons, this is rarely noted in fiction.”

— Charles Baxter