Literature Quotes
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Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.
Octavio Paz
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Facts are not science - as the dictionary is not literature.
Martin H. Fischer
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Confidence is highly overrated when it comes to creating literature. A writer who is overly confident will not engage in the struggle to get it exactly right on the page - but rather, will assume that she's getting it right without the struggle.
Dani Shapiro
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When you kill somebody in the movies, it matters, whereas in literature it can be allegorical.
Barbet Schroeder
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The high arts of literature and music stand in a curious relationship to one another, at once securely comfortable and deeply uneasy - rather like a long-term marriage.
Will Self
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Mathematics, trigonometry, chemistry, psychoanalysis, music, and what not have been related to cubism to give it an easier interpretation. All this has been pure literature, not to say nonsense, which brought bad results, blinding people with theories. Cubism has kept itself within the limits and limitations of painting, never pretending to go beyond it.
Pablo Picasso
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The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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If you tell certain people that you like Kerouac, they assume that’s all you read, like you don’t know anything else about literature. I recognize all the things that people dislike about the way he writes - his tone and the sentimentality of it all. But those books were there for me at a very important point in my life.
Ben Gibbard
Death Cab for Cutie
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I attempt to write a good novel. Whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe.
Elizabeth George
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The difference between farce and humour in literature is, I suppose, that farce strums louder and louder on one string, while humour varies its note, changes its key, grows and spreads and deepens until it may indeed reach tragic depths.
V. S. Pritchett
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Some people think memoirs should be held to a perfect journalistic standard. Some people don't. Obviously I don't. My goal was never to create or to write a perfect journalistic standard of my life. It was always to be as literature.
James Frey
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Readers are hungry to have their stories in the world, to see mirrors of themselves if the stories are about people like them, and to have windows if the stories are about people who have been historically absent in literature.
Jacqueline Woodson
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We talk about characters in literature as though they were built on the model of the real person, but then I often think that the way we present ourselves as real people is based heavily on the way literary psychologies are stylized, and I wonder how the two forms of realistic personhood feed on or fulfill each other.
Alexandra Kleeman
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This, indeed, is one of the eternal paradoxes of both life and literature-that without passion little gets done; yet, without control of that passion, its effects are largely ill or null.
F. L. Lucas
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The literature of former days is like watching a fire from across the water; in present-day literature, the author himself is being scorched by the fire and he is bound to feel it deeply, and when he begins to feel it deeply, he is bound to take part in the social struggle.
Lu Xun
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In the old days of literature, only the very thick-skinned - or the very brilliant - dared enter the arena of literary criticism. To criticise a person's work required equal measures of erudition and wit, and inferior critics were often the butt of satire and ridicule.
Joanne Harris
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I would have to say the novel 'War and Peace' influenced me more than any other book. This greatest of novels demonstrated to me the enormous power of literature and fired me up with a desire to become a writer, to participate in what I considered then to be the greatest of all endeavors.
Douglas Preston
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To a lot of us, literature's eternal significance had seemed beyond arguing - like, say, the illegality of government-sponsored torture.
Darin Strauss
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As with all great works of literature, 'Of Mice and Men' moves with the inexorability of a huge river, and it pours itself, exhausts itself, in the sea of our unconscious. Having read it, we carry the book inside us forever.
Jay Parini
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If you focus on literature through only one small element of it, like the more scientific element of linguistics, then where is the joy that brought us literature in the first place, which is to have a story?
T. C. Boyle
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To those of you who study history, economics, sociology, literature and language I present the challenge of the utilization of the enormous resources in our grasp to the problem of creating a genuinely good life for yourselves and your children.
Polykarp Kusch
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For me, there was no great myth around the movies when I was a young child. My father was very simple about the whole thing. He did not consider cinema an art. Cinema was entertainment. Literature and music were art.
Jacques Audiard
