Literature Quotes
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I don't want to take up literature in a money-making spirit, or be very anxious about making large profits, but selling it at a loss is another thing altogether, and an amusement I cannot well afford.
Lewis Carroll
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I did art history and English literature at Newcastle.
Princess Eugenie of York
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I feel more confident and more satisfied when I reflect that I have two professions and not one. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other. Though it's disorderly it's not so dull, and besides, neither really loses anything, through my infidelity.
Anton Chekhov
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I might not have been academically gifted - I was bad at maths, and science was a struggle - but I was good at English literature and became hooked on theatre.
Alex Sharp
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I went to college at Harvard, then did three years of graduate school at Yale. At both places I studied comparative literature. People find it odd that I went to both Harvard and Yale, and I guess it is odd, but that's just what people did where I grew up.
Lev Grossman
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You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilisation to pieces, turn the world upside down and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of literature.
Mahatma Gandhi
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Margaret Atwood was the author who took me out of children's literature and guided me towards adult literature.
Eleanor Catton
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The sermon is now the true poppy of literature.
David Swing
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Literature creates a fraternity within human diversity and eclipses the frontiers erected among men and women by ignorance, ideologies, religions, languages, and stupidity.
Mario Vargas Llosa
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Lovers of literature will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism.
Josef Skvorecky
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Two of my three siblings are older, so I suppose I learned from them and became a very avid reader at a young age, which I think enough cannot be said for what you can discover through literature.
Julia Roberts
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I am in the interesting position of being sometimes skimmed by the critics and called literature and sometimes called historical fiction.
Philippa Gregory
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I was, without a sliver of a doubt, a no-good, lazy slacker of a child, and after I discovered literature, I was totally and utterly a no-good, lazy slacker of a child who read books. A lot of books, good and bad, but my favourite - the books I read and reread in my teens - were by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.
Ben Peek
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Art and literature need extreme sociality to a degree that even dolphins don't have. We are the only large mammalian species that has such intense sociality. There are some small mammals that have become eusocial - the mole rats - but that's a different thing. Humans are able to understand one another at very high levels, to cooperate in very large groups. Humans depend on one another in ways that are an absolute precondition to sharing the kinds of information that makes narrative possible.
Brian Boyd
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If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it.
Andrew Denton
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Today there is a division between those who write about literature and those who create it. I, obviously, don't think that should be there.
Alistair MacLeod
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I have a masters in African-American literature, and I got a Ph.D. in American Literature. I spent a number of years teaching as a professor in the university system. Then I turned forty and decided I was going to be the woman I wanted to be!
Jeryl Prescott
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I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.
Per Petterson
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Moriarty is arguably the most famous super-villain in terms of literature.
Kam Williams
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I found that dance, music, and literature is how I made sense of the world... it pushed me to think of things bigger than lifes daily routines... to think beyond what is immediate or convenient.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
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A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.
Virginia Woolf
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I'm from Europe, and I was very aware that there are a lot of literature snobs - especially in Europe. As soon as something becomes a success, it has to be bad, and then they'll do everything they can to stab it to death.
Anne Fortier
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Most of the great works of juvenile literature are subversive in one way or another: they express ideas and emotions not generally approved of or even recognized at the time; they make fun of honored figures and piously held beliefs; and they view social pretenses with clear-eyed directness, remarking - as in Andersen's famous tale - that the emperor has no clothes.
Alison Lurie
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Once you get into the era of the printed book, it gets a little easier. After years and years, you make a serious survey of that literature, and then you make it more specific depending on what kind of case appears. I never set out to collect material on cheating at bowling, but I found out that after 20 years, I had a lot of material on cheating at bowling.
Ricky Jay