Literature Quotes
-
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
-
Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their way to Literature.
O. Henry
-
Ever since childhood, I've been interested in history and myth. Not just the facts and figures of the past, but everything that contributes to shape our perception of an age: architecture, art, literature and so forth.
Anne Fortier
-
I have quite a few different Bibles. Having rejected my parents' religion, I still think the King James Bible is the most important work of literature in English. None of us can help being influenced by it.
Ken Follett
-
At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all.
Mary Oliver
-
I actually studied literature and philosophy. So, when I started making films, I didn't really know what I was doing, and I was too proud and arrogant to learn.
Pawel Pawlikowski
-
I think if you're impregnated with good literature, with good culture, you're much more difficult to manipulate, and you're much more aware of the dangers that powers represent.
Mario Vargas Llosa
-
There is a broad cultural current that conveys the idea that a film is like a football team, it represents a nation, it is illustrated literature, filmed radio. These are outdated concepts, totally out of touch with today's realities.
Jean-Jacques Annaud
-
In any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends ... They are still a minority, though a larger one, who are capable of endorsing such first-hand judgement by genuine personal response.
F. R. Leavis
-
What is literature but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few molecules who have the disease called 'thought'.
Kurt Vonnegut
-
I think being a writer is being heavily attuned to the absolute absurdity of things you take for granted, and I think that having actual parents who lived through the Cultural Revolution who are also interested in literature, they're also very attuned to those moments.
Jenny Zhang
-
I used to be more of a purist about literature. I thought, 'If it's a really propulsive story, then maybe there's something unliterary about it.'
Steven Heighton
-
I was always drawn to teachers who made class interesting. In high school, I enjoyed my American and English literature classes because my teachers, Jeanne Dorsey and Dani Barton, created an environment where interaction was important.
Ellen Ochoa
-
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
-
The Bible is not just one book, but an entire library, with stories, songs, poetry, letters and history, as well as literature that might more obviously qualify as 'religious.'
John Drane
-
Our points of reference in America aren't steeped in literature; they're steeped in that five minutes between commercials.
Clarke Peters
-
Here and there in the ancient literature we encounter legends of wise and mysterious games that were conceived and played by scholars, monks, or the courtiers of cultured princes. These might take the form of chess games in which the pieces and squares had secret meanings in addition to their usual functions.
Hermann Hesse
-
I'm using my degree. You know, I studied English and American literature in college, and now I'm an American poet.
Eileen Myles
-
I have another aspect of my career where I'm a scholar of Yiddish and Hebrew literature, and I'll say that when you study Yiddish literature, you know a whole lot about forgotten writers. Most of the books on my shelves were literally saved from the garbage. I am sort of very aware of what it means to be a forgotten artist in that sense.
Dara Horn
-
We are deceiving ourselves if we believe that a literary work written and published in a country where 70 per cent of the population is illiterate, can change the political and social life of the country..it is up to political organization..and not to romantic literature.. to change the present situation.
Zakaria Tamer
-
'Invisible Man' holds such an honored place in African-American literature that Ralph Ellison didn't have to write anything else to break bread with the remembered dead. But he did try to go on, because if a writer has done one great thing, then the pressures to do another are intense.
Darryl Pinckney
-
Christ and the life of Christ is at this moment inspiring the literature of the world as never before, and raising it up a witness against waste and want and war. It may confess Him, as in Tolstoi's work it does, or it may deny Him, but it cannot exclude Him; and in the degree that it ignores His spirit, modern literature is artistically inferior. In other words, all good literature is now Christmas literature.
William Dean Howells
