Quotio
  • Subjects
  • Authors

Literature Quotes

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

Matthew Arnold
1,340
Share

While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.

Cyril Connolly
1,325
Share
The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new. -William Makepeace Thackeray
343
Share

Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.

Herbert Gold
290
Share

To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.

Lawrence Clark Powell
270
Share
Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions. -A. E. Housman
253
Share

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Amy Lowell
231
Share

Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life is the other way round.

David Lodge
230
Share
What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering. -Harold Bloom
227
Share

History is not the story of heroes entirely. It is often the story of cruelty and injustice and shortsightedness. There are monsters, there is evil, there is betrayal. That's why people should read Shakespeare and Dickens as well as history ~~ they will find the best, the worst, the height of noble attainment and the depths of depravity.

David C. Mccullough
218
Share

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.

Salman Rushdie
218
Share
It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave. -Anatole Broyard
217
Share

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

Margaret Atwood
214
Share

There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

Flannery O'Connor
193
Share
Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty. -Lionel Trilling
192
Share

Literature bores me, especially great literature.

John Berryman
186
Share

"Little magazines" are, for the most part, the mayflies of the literary world.

Frederick Crews
172
Share
There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer for them, or turn them into literature. -Stephen Stills
171
Share

The narrative was too constricted; it was like a fetus strangling on its own umbilical cord.

John Gregory Dunne
170
Share

What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power.

John Cheever
170
Share
Lovers of literature will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism. -Josef Skvorecky
164
Share

Literature is the denunciation of the times in which one lives.

Camilo Jose Cela
155
Share

Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.

Nelson Algren
151
Share
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
148
Share

Literature is the question minus the answer.

Roland Barthes
119
Share

Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.

John Cheever
114
Share
One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work. -Gloria Naylor
75
Share

Mr. Fitzgerald--I believe that is how he spells his name--seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.

Zelda Fitzgerald
53
Share

I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.

E. B. White
53
Share
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote. -E. M. Forster
53
Share
  • Listening
  • 1 (current)
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • Living

Find Quotes

  • Authors
  • Subjects
  • Quotes of the Day

Member Fun

  • Join or Login

Subscribe

Made with ♥ by Northcutt.
Copyright © 2021 Quotio. All Rights Reserved.

Credits / Policies