Literature Quotes
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Bad literature of the sort called amusing is spiritual gin.
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It is courage, courage, courage, that raises the blood of life to crimson splendor. Live bravely and present a brave front to adversity
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They didn't teach Nietzsche in the philosophy department at Harvard; philosophy there was strictly analytical stuff and the poetic ramblings of Nietzsche did not belong. And see - you are teaching it in a literature class - so they must have been right.
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How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions?
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I worked out a rather deep-dish theory defining the theater as a form of architecture rather than a form of literature.
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A louse in the locks of literature.
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In my writing, I try to combine all my favorite elements of journalism - accuracy, real characters that exist on this planet - with all my favorite elements of literature: a sense of flow, of propulsion, of wanting to read every sentence.
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All over the world, maybe besides literature, there's nothing that touches many people as movies do. People see them everywhere.
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Jesus is a mythical figure in the tradition of pagan mythology and almost nothing in all of ancient literature would lead one to believe otherwise. Anyone wanting to believe Jesus lived and walked as a real live human being must do so despite the evidence, not because of it.
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In communist Russia, their major organ was Pravda, which means "truth." The Russians knew how to read between the lines. They didn't take their literature literally.
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That is almost the whole of Russian literature: the phenomenal coruscations of the souls of quite commonplace people.
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Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
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Literature has drawn a funny perimeter that other art forms haven't.
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No writing is good enough until you, as an author, make a small contribution, the size of a drop, into the ocean of the world’s literature.
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National literature does not mean much these days; now is the age of world literature, and every one must contribute to hasten thearrival of that age.
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I was thrilled when this year's National Book Award for Young People's Literature went to Neal Schusterman's 'Challenger Deep.' This brilliant book takes you into the mind of a mentally ill teenager and deserves all the accolades it's received.
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Escapist literature gets a bad rap. But I think escape is important for a lot of people in a lot of places.
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I think that literature quite often emerges from areas where there has been a lack of articulation, like women's writing.
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Literature must become party literature. Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat.
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I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
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Tower Records was a place to meet your friends, your co-workers or a place to meet new friends who shared a common love of music, literature and all things cultural.
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Slowly but surely I have been soaking Rilke up these last few months: the man, his work and his life. And that is probably the only right way with literature, with study, with people or with anything else: to let it all soak in, to let it all mature slowly inside you until it has become a part of yourself. That, too, is a growing process. Everything is a growing process. And in between, emotions and sensations that strike you like lightning. But still the most important thing is the organic process of growing.
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Literature, of course, is not a contest.
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I am not attempting here a full appreciation of Colonel Roosevelt. He will be known for all time as one of the great men of America. I am only giving you this personal recollection as a little contribution to his memory, as one that I can make from personal knowledge and which is now known only to myself. His conversation about birds was made interesting by quotations from poets. He talked also about politics, and in the whole of his conversation about them there was nothing but the motive of public spirit and patriotism. I saw enough of him to know that to be with him was to be stimulated in the best sense of the word for the work of life. Perhaps it is not yet realised how great he was in the matter of knowledge as well as in action. Everybody knows that he was a great man of action in the fullest sense of the word. The Press has always proclaimed that. It is less often that a tribute is paid to him as a man of knowledge as well as a man of action. Two of your greatest experts in natural history told me the other day that Colonel Roosevelt could, in that department of knowledge, hold his own with experts. His knowledge of literature was also very great, and it was knowledge of the best. It is seldom that you find so great a man of action who was also a man of such wide and accurate knowledge. I happened to be impressed by his knowledge of natural history and literature and to have had first-hand evidence of both, but I gather from others that there were other fields of knowledge in which he was also remarkable.
