Books Quote by Robert Bringhurst

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

Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is…

— Ezra Pound

Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language…

— Octavio Paz

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

Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic…

— Alain de Botton

“At times I wondered whether writing was not a solipsistic luxury in countries like mine, where there were scant readers, so many people who…

— Mario Vargas Llosa

Literature is the expression of society.

— Charles Nodier

Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It…

— Abraham Verghese

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 the aesthetic exploitation of language”

— Anthony Burgess

The problem with literature, with writing, is that it works sometimes in terms of correction of social ills. Other times, it just does not…

— Wole Soyinka

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.

— Cyril Connolly