Literature Quotes
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No medium is more limited than any other. It's what a person does with it. We could talk about the differences between music and literature and photography, sure, but it really comes down to what a person does.
Bill Henson
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The theory of politics that emerges from the political literature of the pre-Revolutionary years rests on the belief that what lay behind every political scene, the ultimate explanation of every political controversy, was the disposition of power.
Bernard Bailyn
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I began as a boy with artistic talent... as a visual artist... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature.
Russell Banks
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I believe that prizes are useful things for the disciplines, whether we are talking about chemistry or we're talking... It motivates, it, you know, inspires, it encourages and it brings, in the case of literature, it brings literature, the arts out of the ghetto.
Wole Soyinka
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Literature has low enough standards. But we can avoid writing the worst literature if we make ourselves ask ourselves, every two or three sentences we write, 'Is that what I really think?'
Carol Bly
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The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever 'solve'. Whether my answers are any good or not, they represent a fair amount of thinking about the questions.
Northrop Frye
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Not that the writers weren't good. I believe in those books and those writers very much. It's just that in the climate it's really hard to keep the lights on and the doors open when you're selling poetry and literature that appeals to a fringe audience.
Henry Rollins
Black Flag
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Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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Literature is for the sake of humanity.
Cynthia Ozick
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In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. But it's damned satisfying. In life, you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Literature and the other arts play with pattern - our brains understand our world by recognizing patterns - and with possibility. The arts harness our sharpest senses, sight and sound, and our richest ways of understanding, in language and narrative. They were our first schools before schools were ever invented. They develop our imaginations, extend our possibilities, and deepen what we can all share.
Brian Boyd
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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