Literature Quotes
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Literature, like nobility, runs in the blood.
William Hazlitt
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I think what's happening is, it's all - fantasy, science fiction, ghosts, trolls, whatever - finally being called, being admitted to be literature. The way it used to be, before the Realists and the bloody Modernists took over.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Writers themselves benefit from all helpful information about their task and methods. Readers, in turn, can have both their understanding and appreciation of literature enhanced by information about the writer's work.
Leland Ryken
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When I was 13 or 14, I started devouring novels; literature took quite a while to take me over, but it caught up just in time to save me from becoming a mathematician.
Mark Haddon
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I ought to at least be able to read literature in French. I went to an enlightened grade school that started us on French in fifth grade, which meant that by the time I graduated high school I had been at it for eight years.
Lev Grossman
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Writers throughout the ages have one weapon, which is literature, but they also have their responsibilities as a citizen when literature does not seem to suffice. I mean, they are not mutually exclusive. One continues to write anyway but if you are called out to demonstrate, if people are being killed in the streets, it's hardly the moment to go for your pen and paper, you know, help in one way or the other.
Wole Soyinka
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There is a clear acknowledgement all over the world that we should not teach people to read and then to leave them without literature. For they would then relapse into a dreary and ultimately dangerous state of half-education, in which they would be easily satisfied by crude semi-pictorial approximations of the strip cartoon and by the abundant supply of degenerate literature which destroys, rather than promotes, a capacity to face the problems of the world with skill and courage.
Ambalal Dahyabhai Patel
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To encourage literature and the arts is a duty which every good citizen owes to his country.
George Washington
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The writers who have been serious about recreating American literature have always been far and few between. What we do have at the end of the 20th century that we didn't have at the beginning, at that time of the Lost Generation of rich white boys, is a mixture. We're now getting gay writers of color, let's say, and women of color being published. This is unprecedented.
Ana Castillo
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I feel music is another kind of literature.
Kevin Young
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When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.
James Earl Jones
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I think it is important to reach people through arts and literature, because then you establish a connection that's not an instant crisis.
Edwidge Danticat
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When I went to college - when I read Shakespeare or Dickens or Scott - I just felt that, as a citizen of England, a British citizen, this was as much my heritage as any schoolboy's. That is one of the things the Empire taught, that apart from citizenship, the synonymous inheritance of the citizenship was the literature.
Derek Walcott
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Nothing in fine print is ever good news.
Andy Rooney
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The whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it's called in the old literature, is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another.
Terence McKenna
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Even in the most peaceful communities, an appetite for violence shows up in dreams, fantasies, sports, play, literature, movies and television. And, so long as we don't transform into angels, violence and the threat of violence - as in punishment and deterrence - is needed to rein in our worst instincts.
Paul Bloom
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The natural sciences are sometimes said to have no concern with values, nor to seek morality and goodness, and therefore belong to an inferior order of things. Counter-claims are made that they are the only living and dynamic studies... Both contentions are wrong. Language, Literature and Philosophy express, reflect and contemplate the world. But it is a world in which men will never be content to stay at rest, and so these disciplines cannot be cut off from the great searching into the nature of things without being deprived of life-blood.
Cyril Norman Hinshelwood
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More than art, more than literature, music is universally accessible.
Billy Joel
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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?
Polly Toynbee
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To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.
Lawrence Clark Powell
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The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.
Augusten Burroughs
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I do not believe in sex distinction in literature, law, politics, or trade - or that modesty and virtue are more becoming to women than to men, but wish we had more of it everywhere.
Belva Lockwood
