Literature Quotes · Page 31

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

— Carlos Ruiz Zafon

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

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

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

— Mickey Spillane

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

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

— Sven Birkerts

Politics is marginal, but literature moves along by indirection.

— Italo Calvino

No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression, -this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget.

— William James

“What happens when we start believing the world and what is important in it are only these reactions and prejudices? What kind…

— Sergio Troncoso

'Neotenty' is 'remaining young,' and it may be ironic that it is so little known, because human evolution has been dominated by…

— Tom Robbins

Literature is my calling To hold up the mirror to my countrymen comes natural to me; and in the open field of…

— Anonymous

A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part…

— Christopher Hitchens

Every author that creates is a liar;literature is a lie,but from that lie, a recreation of reality is born. Therefore, recreating reality…

— Juan Rulfo

“I loved her; I didn’t know how to say it without breaking down the autobot façade she saw before her and revealing…

— David Louden

If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others.…

— Yann Martel

“Here was intellectual life, he thought, and here was beauty, warm and wonderful as he had never dreamed it could be. He…

— Jack London

In my profession more generally, it's not an exaggeration to say that masculinity is viewed as the root of all evil. If…

— Jonathan Gottschall

I love and collect contemporary art and go to all the art fairs. I love Damien Hirst and Matthew Barney. I grew…

— Nouriel Roubini

Of all the many and (thanks to a free press) the ever-multiplying blessings attendant upon the "glorious constitution" of literature, not the…

— Samuel Laman Blanchard

A child... who has learned from fairy stories to believe that what at first seemed a repulsive, threatening figure can magically change…

— Bruno Bettelheim

My daughter is reading various Young Adult vampire stuff, and I ask her, "Is there even a bad vampire in the story?"…

— Mike Mignola

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted…

— Carl Sagan

The very cheapness of literature is making even wise people forget that if a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.…

— John Ruskin

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

— Dejan Stojanovic

Literature belongs first and foremost to the language in which it is being written.

— Amos Oz

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

— Ellen Glasgow

Look at the history of literature, and you find the history of beauty on the one hand and the IOUs on the…

— Richard Flanagan

“...for literature had always been a solace for him, something that the ugliness of facts could not spoil.”

— E.M. Forster

“There is no book so bad it does not contain something good.”

— Pliny

Literature stands related to Man as Science stands to Nature; it is his history.

— John Henry Newman

In all highly civilised communities Pretence is prominent, and sooner or later invades the regions of Literature.

— James Payn

“When wisdom comes, transformation comes. Wisdom makes the difference between the succeeding man and the failing man.”

— Patience Johnson

The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie.

— James Dickey

Children's literature is one of my joys, and it's also my mental comfort food.

— Gretchen Rubin

Slaves were expected to sing as well as to work. A silent slave was not liked, either by masters or overseers.

— Frederick Douglass

The form [of literature] matters little to me, classical or not.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“This world would be a pleasant place if people didn’t inhabit it.”

— K. Ritz

My heart love till now for sweared sight, for I never saw true beauty till this night.

— William Shakespeare

“My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart. We”

— Gabrielle Zevin