Literature Quotes
-
More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
John le Carre
-
If you look at the recent Nobel Prize winners, one couldn't say that the work didn't matter and the political commitment did. Who had ever heard of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz? He is not politically involved. Octavio Paz is a great poet, also not politically involved. The Nobel Prize is for literature, for the quality of work over the years.
Nadine Gordimer
-
If we think about folk forms, they belong to disenfranchised people, people who have not been allowed access to the poetry of literature or the leisure time that comes with the pursuit of poetry. Instead, this is ceremony. This is a highly charged way to create a sacred space that isn't necessarily about God, but is about human experience at its most profound levels - whether that's love or grief, separation, or homeland. All are altered states.
Eliza Griswold
-
Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.
Cesare Pavese
-
I think of myself as a Russophile. I speak the language and studied the nation's literature and history in college.
Chrystia Freeland
-
Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.
Simone de Beauvoir
-
What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?
William Butler Yeats
-
Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land;
Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand.
William Butler Yeats
-
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.
Raymond Pettibon
Black Flag
-
There can be no great literature in America until her writers have learned to trust her implicitly and love her devoutly.
Ernest Hemingway
-
When I was a worker I busied myself with socialist or, if you like, marxist literature.
Adolf Hitler
-
There is much made in the psychological literature of the effects of divorce on children, particularly as it comes to their own marriages, lo those many years later. We have always wondered why there is not more research done on the children of happy marriages. Our parents' love is not some grand passion, there are no swoons of lust, no ball gowns and tuxedos, but here is the truth: they have not spent a night apart since the day they married.How can we ever hope to find a love to live up to that?
Eleanor Brown
-
Television is the literature of the illiterate, the culture of the low-brow, the wealth of the poor, the privilege of the underprivileged, the exclusive club of the excluded masses.
Lee Loevinger
-
Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
Nadine Gordimer
-
I'm not terribly conversant with children's literature in general. I tend to read books for adults, being an adult.
Lois Lowry
-
There is nothing sacred or untouchable except the freedom to think. Without criticism, that is to say, without rigor and experimentation, there is no science, without criticism there is no art or literature. I would also say that without criticism there is no healthy society.
Octavio Paz
-
Eighteen centuries have passed since the Bible was finished. They have been centuries of great changes. In their course the world has been wrought over into newness at almost every point. But, to-day, the text of the Scriptures, after copyings almost innumerable and after having been tossed about through ages of ignorance and tumult, is found by exhaustive criticism to be unaltered in every important particular — there being not a single doctrine, nor duty, nor fact of any grade, that is brought into question by variations of readings — a fact that stands alone in the history of such ancient literature.
Enoch Fitch Burr
-
There were the usual exhortations to purity – think of the novel not as your opportunity to get rich or famous but to wrestle, in your own way, with the titans of the form – exhortations poets don’t have to make, given the economic marginality of the art, an economic marginality that soon all literature will share.
Ben Lerner
-
The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
Milton Friedman
-
I can't believe that people really prefer to go to the concert hall under intellectually trying, socially trying, physically trying conditions, unable to repeat something they have missed, when they can sit at home under the most comfortable and stimulating circumstances and hear it as they want to hear it. I can't imagine what would happen to literature today if one were obliged to congregate in an unpleasant hall and read novels projected on a screen.
Milton Babbitt
-
The Da Vinci Code may well be the only novel ever written that begins with the word 'renowned'... I think what enabled the first word to tip me off that I was about to spend a number of hours in the company of one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature was this. Putting curriculum vitae details into complex modifiers on proper names or definite descriptions is what you do in journalistic stories about deaths; you just don't do it in describing an event in a narrative... Why did I keep reading? Because London Heathrow is a long way from San Francisco International.
Geoffrey K. Pullum
-
One of the most insidious myths in American wine culture is that a wine is good if you like it. Liking a wine has nothing to do with whether it is good. Liking a wine has to do with liking that wine, period. Wine requires two assessments: one subjective, the other objective. In this it is like literature. You may not like reading Shakespeare but agree that Shakespeare was a great writer nonetheless.
Karen MacNeil
