Best Literary Sayings
789 Literary quotes by 596 unique authors
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Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about…
— David Foster Wallace
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And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, 'Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the…
— Doris Lessing
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Even in dialogue, your own style rules your selection. Do not give yourself a blank check of this kind: 'I'll merely reproduce what I think…
— Ayn Rand
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Our sufferings and weaknesses, in so far as they are personal, are of no literary interest whatsoever. They are only interesting in so far as…
— Wystan Hugh Auden
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I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.
— Anthony Burgess
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When we are very young, we tend to regard the ability to use a colon much as a budding pianist regards the ability to play…
— Eric Partridge
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I told that girl, in the kindest, gentlest way, that I could not consent to deliver judgment upon any one's manuscript, because an individual's verdict…
— Mark Twain
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Translation presents not merely a paradigm but the utmost case of engaged literary interpretation
— Unknown Author
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Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
— Gaston Bachelard
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The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism. Drunk with self-love,…
— Camille Paglia
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If you look at history you'll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands…
— Desiderius Erasmus
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Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge. Books are less often made use of as…
— William Hazlitt
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Nothing like this has been attempted before. (...) It might be called a literary Porto Alegre. That implies a beginning, with much fierce argument and…
— Perry Anderson
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Jesmyn Ward is an alchemist. She transmutes pain and loss into gold. Men We Reaped illustrates hardships but thankfully, vitally, it's just as clear about…
— Victor LaValle
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Our generation grew up with the Review as a fact of life. It was America’s literary magazine. To our minds, it still is. It has…
— Lorin Stein
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Most book things now (with a few exceptions) are just built around nice, safe books written for nice and safe book club readers. These are…
— Scott McClanahan
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Bridget Jones is part of literary lore now and actually to be a part of it is enormously flattering.
— Colin Firth
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I have been the creative literary mind of the century.
— Gertrude Stein
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There are a few critics overseas, and occasionally a critic will write an astute analysis of the movie. There is value in reading critics that…
— George Lucas
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I’m a huge fan of the books myself, so to know that I got to play Clary – who’s a literary heroine to me –…
— Lily Collins
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Californias red-legged frogs are part of our historical, literary and cultural heritage, ... It is critically important that we ensure that there will always be…
— Robert Stack
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Steve Sailer gives us the real Barack Obama, who turns out to be very, very different - and much more interesting - than the bland…
— John Derbyshire
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Jim Greenfield’s The Taxman Cometh will undoubtedly put a smile on the face of even the most dedicated big government freeloader. In the ‘Everyone Deserves…
— Unknown Author
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Whether early or late, the Parker novels are all superlative literary entertainments.
— Terry Teachout
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This is a major, wide-ranging, and comprehensive book. A philosophical investigation that is also a literary and historical study, Truth and Truthfulness asks how and…
— Alexander Nehamas
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596 authors contributed a total of 789 Literary Quotes, led by these top contributors: