Books Quote by E. M. Forster

Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes.

— George Orwell

It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.

— Andre Gide

When literature becomes deliberately indifferent to the opposition of good and evil it betrays its function and forfeits all claim to excellence.

— Simone Weil

Literature is a human apocalypse, man's revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the…

— Northrop Frye

In the right hands, literature is not resorted to as a consolation, and by the broken and decayed, but as a decalogue.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it.

— David Shields

Literature is the immortality of speech.

— August Wilhelm von Schlegel

There's something to be said for an author who clearly respects a reader.

— Jami Attenberg

“Contemporary literature, in each and every epoch, is the worst enemy of culture. A reader’s limited time is wasted in reading a thousand books…

— Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.

— Anatole Broyard

Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.

— Shirley Hazzard

There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic.

— Anne Stevenson