Literature Quotes
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Literature is analysis after the event.
Doris Lessing
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I think that literature is something that embraces a much larger experience than politics. It's an expression of what is life, of what are all the dimensions of life. But politics is one among others.
Mario Vargas Llosa
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His examiner...said severely: 'Baskerville, you blank round, discursiveness is not literature.' 'The aim of literature,' Baskerville replied grandly, 'is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.'
Donald Barthelme
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All things truly wicked start from innocence.
Ernest Hemingway
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While in the West, the insane are so many that they are put in an asylum, in China the insane are so unusual that we worship them, as anybody who has a knowledge of Chinese literature will testify.
Lin Yutang
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If children haven't been read to, they don't love books. They need to love books, for books are the basis of literature, composition, history, world events, vocabulary, and everything else.
Edith Schaeffer
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I think that the best literature has a core that you can't lock to a time or place but that can generate lots of meanings and translations.
Karl Ove Knausgard
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There's no shortage of orphans in 19th-century literature, but it's hard to find a single happy, communicative, functional parental relationship in the whole of 'Great Expectations,' even among the minor characters.
David Nicholls
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I can't think of one person I've ever met who didn't like some type of music. More than art, more than literature, music is universally accessible.
Billy Joel
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Indeed; peace literature is almost exclusively read, though to good effect, by pacifists, while what is needed is the canvassing of those who have not so far been won to the cause.
Fredrik Bajer
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Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.
E. M. Forster
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I grew up to be indifferent to the distinction between literature and science, which in my teens were simply two languages for experience that I learned together.
Jacob Bronowski
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I have grown up on literature and mythological stories. They have fascinated me since childhood, and I believe every character that I portray on screen is an extension of my personality to some degree. That is why whatever role I play seems in my comfort zone.
Ashish Sharma
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I don't think literature will be purged until its philosophic pretentiousness is extruded, and I shant live to see that purge, nor perhaps when it has happened will anything survive.
E. M. Forster
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I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time - and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come.
John Green
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I was born in 1952, so obviously the sixties were important. That's when I came of age. It was also a revolutionary period, a complete break with the generation before us in terms of culture, literature, music, and in politics, of course. 1968 was an important year; I was 16, and the world became clear to me, visible, so to say.
Per Petterson
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There should be a democracy of voices in literature. There are people who live with a kind of striving and with a certain kind of tenderness - it's not an unusual thing - and maybe that's not written about enough.
Anne Michaels
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A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug.
George Borrow
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There is much virtue in a window. It is to a human being as a frame is to a painting, as a proscenium to a play, as 'form' to literature. It strongly defines its content.
Max Beerbohm
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Somehow, in the novel format, I don't really like to do upfront, ideological discussion. In my heart, literature remains a poetic and ambiguous medium. On the other hand, I trained as a documentary filmmaker in film school, so my films very much reflect reality and socio-political problems. They're less subtle I would say.
Xiaolu Guo
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Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.
Andrzej Wajda
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Sara Blair's Harlem Crossroads is an important addition to the body of literature that currently exists about Harlem. It brilliantly illuminates the complex relationship between photographic representation and race, and adds new insight into the ways in which this one black community has figured in both the critical and public imaginations. Harlem Crossroads is a tour de force.
Dawoud Bey
