Literature Quotes · Page 32

Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.

— Anton Chekhov

The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.

— Toni Morrison

A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.

— Northrop Frye

“Literature isn't innocent. I've known that since I was fifteen.”

— Roberto Bolaño

This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.

— Terry Tempest Williams

No one has the right to enter literature without fresh new ideas. We’ve got too many dexterous drudges as it is.

— Jan Neruda

Literature is an investment of genius which has dividends to all subsequent times

— John Burroughs

Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.

— Joan Didion

...I have come to make distinctions between what I call the academy and literature, the moral equivalents of church and God. The…

— Dorothy Allison

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not…

— Thomas Carlyle

One is not quite certain that creativeness in the arts, literature, and science functions best in an environment of absolute freedom. Chances…

— Eric Hoffer

The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own.

— William Empson

The herbalist I met a few times - it was great - she gave me literature about the different processes that an…

— Caitriona Balfe

I live on the Santa Monica Beach and bike up and down almost every day. I like exercise, and I like literature…

— Barry Barish

I am certain that there are two things in life which are dependable: the delights of the flesh and the delights of…

— Peter Greenaway

No medium is more limited than any other. It's what a person does with it. We could talk about the differences between…

— Bill Henson

“I've always felt that the performance of a raag resembles a novel - or at least the kind of novel I'm attempting…

— Vikram Seth

Throughout African-American literature, the writer has, in a sense, been burdened by the necessity of pleading the case for the whole race.…

— Glenn Ligon

I would describe myself as a writer and a student of media. If there's a central idea in media theory, it's to…

— McKenzie Wark

I believe that all literatures can have political uses and misuses. Sometimes politics can enhance, sometimes it can get in the way…

— Gayl Jones

I've been acting for years and years, at prep school - school plays, that kind of thing. That was always very high…

— James Callis

Many people have tried to define science fiction. I like to call it the literature of exploration and change. While other genres…

— David Brin

“Rainer Maria Rilke greeted and wrestled with the angels of his Duino Elegies in the solitude of a castle surrounded by white…

— Aberjhani

If the detective should suffer overmuch from the artistic temperament, and his fellow lodger should dwell overlong upon the fairness of a…

— Loren D. Estleman

“something genuine like a mark in a toilet, graced with guts and gutted with grace”

— E.E. Cummings

One of the biggest problems in literature is the lack of subtlety.

— Mo Yan

Small presses take chances. Chances are at the heart of all the literature we later know as great.

— Kay Ryan

Censors are necessary, increasingly necessary, if America is to avoid having a vital literature.

— Don Marquis

Escapist literature gets a bad rap. But I think escape is important for a lot of people in a lot of places.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“But the required survey of English literature troubled and disquieted him in a way nothing had ever done before.”

— John Williams

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

— Wallace Stevens

A great literature is chiefly the product of inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation

— Anonymous

“Nor is the limitation of what is sayable a limit to the doable: this last is the possibility of literature.”

— Carlos Fuentes

I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.

— Mario Vargas Llosa

“When I'm writing I don't want anyone else in the room - including myself.”

— Jonathan Franzen

There have been so many instances in my life where movies, music, or literature has made my life tangibly better.

— James Ponsoldt

I think fantasy literature is the one true literature of hope and imagination.

— Vera Nazarian

To feel that literature has any politically redemptive power at all just seems increasingly naive.

— Sally Rooney

“Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be. (Southey's reply to Charlotte Bronte)”

— Anonymous

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

— T. S. Eliot