Literature Quotes
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The general history of art and literature shows that the highest achievements of the human mind are, as a rule, not favourably received at first.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Literature is a form of language that breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of a language which has no other law than that of affirming in opposition to all other forms of discourse its own precipitous existence.
Michel Foucault
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I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory than a success with some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree.
Honore de Balzac
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England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature--for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk.
E. M. Forster
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Literature is not a sack race. There aren't real winners and losers in the Republic of Letters.
Charles Baxter
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Russian literature got me interested in what literature means.
Elif Batuman
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I love 19th-century Russian literature, the avant garde, the Soviet period.
Amor Towles
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The great Cham of literature. (Samuel Johnson)
Tobias Smollett
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Nonfiction writers are second-class citizens, the Ellis Island of literature. We just can't quite get in. And yes, it pisses me off.
William Styron
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There is a cheap literature that speaks to us of the need of escape. It is true that when we travel we are in search of distance. But distance is not to be found. It melts away. And escape has never led anywhere. The moment a man finds that he must play the races, go the Arctic, or make war in order to feel himself alive, that man has begin to spin the strands that bind him to other men and to the world. But what wretched strands! A civilization that is really strong fills man to the brim, though he never stir. What are we worth when motionless, is the question.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I never, as a reader, have been particularly interested in dystopian literature or science fiction or, in fact, fantasy.
Lois Lowry
