Literature Quotes
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Horace, in a particularly boastful mood, once said his verse would last as long as the vestal virgins kept going up the Capitoline Hill to worship at the temple of Jupiter. But Horace's poetry has lasted longer than Jupiter's religion, and Jupiter himself has only survived because he disappeared into literature.
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We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous.
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Poets are always the advance guard of literature; the advance guard of life. It is for this reason that their recognition comes so slowly.
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The novel succeeds on terms exclusive to literature. A good film succeeds on terms exclusive to the cinema. That's why so many bad novels can become good movies, like 'Jaws' or 'The Godfather.'
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I don't think enough journalists read enough - literature, history. You've got to keep reading all through your career.
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On almost anything someone does in the computer business, you can go back in the literature and prove someone had done it earlier.
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Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.
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It is, of course, traditional in children's literature to get rid of the parents.
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A particular ikon an aid to devotion may be itself a word of art, but that is logically accidental; its artistic merits will not make it a better ... ikon. They may make it a worse one.
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I used to think she was quite intelligent , in my stupidity. The reason I did was because she knew quite a lot about the theater and plays and literature and all that stuff. If somebody knows quite a lot about all those things, it takes you quite a while to find out whether they're really stupid or not.
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A good aphorism is too hard for the tooth of time, and is not worn away by all the centuries, although it serves as food for every epoch. Hence it is the greatest paradox in literature, the imperishable in the midst of change, the nourishment which always remains highly valued, as salt does, and never becomes stupid like salt.
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In Britain, the great hidden secret of talking animals and children's literature is how political it was in its bones, beneath the obvious cuteness.
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I grew up reading not-serious literature, like comic books and pulp novels, so my instinct is to amuse the reader and entertain.
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The writer studies literature, not the world.
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I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into.
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I don't think if you're serious about literature your library is filled with award-winning books.
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Once upon a time, an editor could try out one or two wacky books, knowing full well that their list would counterbalance any risk with a stable of best-sellers and safe bets. Nowadays, every book must earn its own bread. With low overheads and an often episodic operating status, the small independent press is nicely placed to snap up the most innovative literature going at the moment. To take the risks. Meaning that small presses are no longer just outfits set up to publish your or your friends' work. They have something genuinely important to offer.
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Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.
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T.S. Eliot was one of the first poets introduced to me when I started studying literature and has felt like a close friend ever since. No one nails urban despair quite like Eliot.
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Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.
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In European and American society, many pundits started to lament the death of literature; looking at youth who were getting more and more attracted to sitcoms - hard, adventure films and said, our children are no longer reading, or else they're reading cartoons.
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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'.
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The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
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My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.
