Bob Quote by David Bennun

Literature is what you write when you think you should be saying something. Writing begins when you'd rather be doing anything else: and you've…

— Kenneth Patchen

I never wrote poetry, just prose. I don't really consider songwriting a form of poetry either. The words are important, of course, but they're…

— Michael Gira

“This isn’t the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, and a play is a novel…

— Fernando Pessoa

Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or…

— Barbara Kingsolver

With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work…

— Terry Eagleton

"Poetry" refers to the quite challenging and quite resistant sets of words put together to be admired and interpreted by people who are already…

— Stephen Burt

Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.

— Mary Oliver

“Imaginative poetry produces a far greater mental strain than novels. It produces probably the severest strain of any form of literature. It is the…

— Arnold Bennett

“To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such…

— Fernando Pessoa

Literature is a form of language that breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes…

— Michel Foucault

Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.

— Juan Ramon Jimenez

Poetry always runs away from you - it's very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you…

— Abbas Kiarostami