Literature Quotes · Page 50

I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.

— Dashiell Hammett

Good literature is absolutely necessary for a society that wants to be free.

— Mario Vargas Llosa

If I might control the literature of the household, I would guarantee the well-being of Church and State.

— Francis Bacon

Literature has nothing to do with usefulness; the most useful place in any house is the toilet.

— Theophile Gautier

“Sexual revelation in literature, must be tactful and must serve plot”

— Gore Vidal

I probably have a 20,000-word vocabulary. I'll match my wits with anyone on literature, science and the arts.

— Mike Tyson

I consider Yoda to be just about the most evil character that I've ever seen in the history of literature.

— David Brin

Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Anything can become a children's book if you give it to a child...Children are actually the best (and worst) audience for literature…

— Orson Scott Card

If you look at the beginning of children's entertainment in literature, the first books that were written for kids were cautionary tales.…

— Lee Unkrich

... as usual I am suffering much from doubt as to the worth of what I am doing and fear lest I…

— George Eliot

There are even more statues of Robert Burns than of any other figure in world literature. Indeed if we discount figures of…

— Len G. Murray

One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in…

— Jorge Luis Borges

It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have…

— Penelope Lively

Russian literature saved my soul. When I was a young girl in school and I asked what is good and what is…

— Irina Ratushinskaya

The forties and fifties were years of high poet-incense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to…

— Gwendolyn Brooks

Writers and scholars have emerged in recent times (some familiar, some new) to continue to challenge the notion of a literature that…

— Jessica Hagedorn

I'm not much of a correspondent. My letters are not only uninteresting but sparse. I'm glad I don?t have to write for…

— Groucho Marx

“Practically all human literature deals with the present and the past; when literature tries to describe the future, it at once ceases…

— Francis Mccullagh

“Literature shrivels in a universal language, and an uprooted language rots before it dies. And it should be possible to lift the…

— J.R.R. Tolkien

At Harvard I was taking an African-American studies class, and we were reading about the tragic mulatto. Invariably, the tragic mulatto can't…

— Soledad O'Brien

Literature has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I can't think back before a time that…

— Alexandra Adornetto

“It didn't help that I was never allowed to study anything remotely contemporary until the last year of university: there was never…

— Nick Hornby

“There it lay in the early sunshine of spring. It looked a town rather than a house, but a town built, not…

— Virginia Woolf

Not a word that I have written about Yugoslavia is denounceable, not a single one. It is literature.

— Peter Handke

I was an English-literature major, and that's all about stories and narratives.

— Rachel Weisz

I was far away from Marathi literature, theatre, arts, everything. I was a late entrant to it.

— Mahesh Manjrekar

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature…literature should be left to essayists.

— Jacqueline Susann

If one discards the Bible as being unreliable, then he must discard almost all literature of antiquity.

— Josh McDowell

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

— Sinclair Lewis

Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.

— Alphonse de Lamartine

“Thus like a Captive in an Isle confin'd, Man walks at large, a Pris'ner of the Mind”

— John Dryden

Literature doesn’t exactly have a strong mental-health track record.

— Anonymous

High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.

— Mark Twain

“To write only according to the rules laid down by masterpieces signifies that one is not a master but a pupil.”

— David Shields

The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth.

— Adam Johnson

With our short sight we affect to take a comprehensive view of eternity. Our horizon is the universe.

— Paul Laurence Dunbar

The most prevalent poetic representation of contemporary experience is the mimesis of disorientation by non sequitor.

— Tony Hoagland

The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

— Alfred North Whitehead

All media can muddy the mind. Language leads to literature. It also leads to dogma.

— Jennifer Stone