Literature Quotes
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Chess is my profession. I am my own boss; I am free. I like literature and music, classical especially. I am in fact quite normal; I have a Bohemian profession without being myself a Bohemian. I am neither a conformist nor a great revolutionary.
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In my first publication I might have claimed that I had come to the conclusion, as a result of serious study of the literature and deep thought, that valuable antibacterial substances were made by moulds and that I set out to investigate the problem. That would have been untrue and I preferred to tell the truth that penicillin started as a chance observation. My only merit is that I did not neglect the observation and that I pursued the subject as a bacteriologist. My publication in 1929 was the starting-point of the work of others who developed penicillin especially in the chemical field.
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The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the one American writer whom the English whole-heartedly admire is Walt Whitman. There, you will hear them say, is the real American undisguised. In the whole of English literature there is no figure which resembles his - among all our poetry none in the least comparable to Leaves of Grass
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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.
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An essay is a work of literary art which has a minimum of one anecdote and one universal idea.
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Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.
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The key thing for an intellectually rigorous writer to come to grips with is the marginalization of literature by more technologically sophisticated and thus more visceral forms.
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What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?
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This is a great mind at work examining itself. This is where literature comes from.
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Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different.
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Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.
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What is very troubling is that people who have tried to write literature, even, for example, proletarian writers, seem to write within the norms of the dominant class.
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Literature, taken in all its bearings, forms the grand line of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms.
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I have respect for literature. If he found the words, if she found the words - this is a book!
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He who keeps his cool best wins.
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It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
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Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations. Lydgate's discontent was much harder to bear; it was the sense that there was a grand existence in thought and effective action lying around him, while his self was being narrowed into the miserable isolation of egoistic fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might allay such fears.
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This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
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Literature sustains life because it captures death in its forward march. Clickety-clickety-clack, the wheels go round and round ...
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I believe that all literatures can have political uses and misuses. Sometimes politics can enhance, sometimes it can get in the way of imaginative literature. . . . I'm not sure one can be a creative writer and a politician -- not a "good" politician.
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The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.
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In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.
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Woolf is an important writer for me, someone I read often and who forms part of my ideal of what literature can do.
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The hard-drinking newspaperman is, or used to be, a stock character of fiction. Now he is being phased out of literature just as he is being phased out of life.
