Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions. — Iris Murdoch
A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can. — Edith Hamilton
Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture. — Juan Ramon Jimenez
Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism. The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors. — Tristan Tzara
Literature is the question minus the answer. — Roland Barthes
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
Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas! — D. H. Lawrence
A literary work can only be received through symbols, through concepts - for that is what words are; but cinema, like music, allows for utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work. — Andrei Tarkovsky
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
Literature has the power to change lives, minds, and hearts. — Cam'ron
The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth. — William Butler Yeats
Literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness. — F. R. Leavis
True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics. — Yevgeny Zamyatin
Literary Works Quotes
If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us. — Franz Kafka
The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work. — Johannes V. Jensen
The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work. — Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
You're a work of art. Not everyone will understand you, but the ones who do, will never forget about you.
The period that I could consider the most important in my literary work came about beginning with the Revolution, and in a certain way, developed as a consequence of the Revolution. But it was also a result of the counterrevolutionary coup of November 1975. — Jose Saramago
I divide all literary works into two categories: Those I like and those I don't like. No other criterion exists for me. — Anton Chekhov
Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore. — Stendhal
Work hard in silence, let your success be the noise
Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of. — Bertolt Brecht
The nearest approach to the infallible in literary judgment is represented in the colossal work of the teacher of all these three [Edmund Gosse, Edward Dowden and George Saintsbury], the greatest critic that ever lived - not an Englishman, but a Frenchman, the wonderful Sainte-Beuve. — Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
I doubt very much if a man whose main literary interests were in works by Mr. Zane Grey, admirable as they may be, is particularly equipped to be the chief executive of this country, particularly where Indian Affairs are concerned. — Dean Acheson
A writer often wants to change a reader’s perception about the world, which is a political act. But we have to work through character, so helping the reader to feel close to fictional characters is the gate through which we have to usher the reader. — Caryl Phillips
Literary Day Quotes
Literary studies were no more than a series of autopsies performed by heartless technicians. Worse than autopsies: biopsies. Vivisection. Even movies, which I love more than anything, more than life itself, they even do it with movies these days. — Stephen Fry
Being a Negro writer these days is a racket and I'm going to make the most of it while it lasts. About twice a year I sell a story. It is acclaimed. I am a genius in the making. Thank God for this Negro literary renaissance. Long may it flourish — Wallace Thurman
Phooey, I say, on all white-shoe college boys who edit their campus literary magazines. Give me an honest con man any day. — J. D. Salinger
Work until you no longer have to introduce yourself.
I felt, "Oh, film is a great art because I can pull in music and visual imagery, and it has its literary aspects and drama." Film was a sort of Wagnerian synthesis of the arts, as opposed to opera, which Wagner had thought would be. That's another art form that has seen its best days. — James Toback
I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house. — Amy Tan
I promise myself great pleasure from my visit to England. You know I am to stay with Dickens while in London; and beside his own very agreeable society, I shall enjoy that of the most noted literary men of the day, which will be a great gratification to me. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Maybe it won't work out. But maybe seeing if it does will be the best adventure ever.
People have been predicting the death of philosophy since the 17th century. When I was a student, people were saying, 'We're in the last days of philosophy.' Then we were told in the '60s it would be replaced by sociology, then by literary criticism. — Bernard Williams
No one is obliged to take a position on the urgent issues of the day, but there are times when our impoverished public sphere could do with some occasional assertions of literary and moral authority. — Pankaj Mishra
The old days of screenwriting, and myths about screenwriting, are maybe over. It's a literary form, if you can wake up to it. — William Monahan
Used to be in the old days, only the pulp writers wrote like machines. Now everybody is expected to be literary John Henrys. So in that context someone like me is an anomaly. — Junot Diaz
Literary Worlds Quotes
Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world. — Samuel Johnson
Sex in a woman's world has the same currency a penny has in a man's. Every penny saved is a penny earned in one world and in the next every sexual adventure is a literary experience. — Harry Golden
Used books are the sluts of the literary world. Passed around from person to person, spreading their pages for anyone, getting cheaper and cheaper until eventually they end up in prison. — Stephen Colbert
Just do what works for you, because there will always be someone who thinks differently.
I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike — Harold Bloom
We writers - we're the snowflakes of the literary world. We each have our own shape. — Alice Walker
The biggest misconception that people have about the literary life is the romance of it. That a writer has this large world available to him or her of people, of ideas, of experiences, of interchange of ideas... — Walter Mosley
If you're not willing to do the work, don't complain about the result.
There's a socialist bias to the consensus of the literary world: a '30s mentality that says factory workers are more worthy of our attention. — Jay McInerney
Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life. — Unknown
Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
The literary world is made up of little confederacies, each looking upon its own members as the lights of the universe; and considering all others as mere transient meteors, doomed to soon fall and be forgotten, while its own luminaries are to shine steadily into immortality. — Washington Irving
Literary Quotes
What a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its editorial page is terseness, humor, descriptive power, satire, originality, good literary style, clever condensation and accuracy, accuracy, accuracy. — Joseph Pulitzer
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Stay positive, work had and make it happen.
Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Women need to become literary "criminals," break the literary laws and reinvent their own, because the established laws prevent women from presenting the reality of their lives. — Kathy Acker
It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience. — Robert Morgan
Forget all the reasons why it won't work and believe the one reason it will.
One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name. — George Saintsbury
When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling. — Ted Rall
The book trade invented literary prizes to stimulate sales, not to reward merit. — Michael Moorcock
The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. — Jose Saramago
Literary Art Quotes
The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called "the permanent things"-the norms of human action. — Russell Kirk
A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two. — Will Eisner
Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it — Mark Twain
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
Desmond O'Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish
Literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed
himself over the decades to the vocation of poetry and
has lived selflessly for the art — Seamus Heaney
San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth. — William Saroyan
In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. — George Orwell
You must be prepared to work always without applause.
Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself. — Robertson Davies
One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. — Walter Pater
The delight we experience when we allow ourselves to respond to a fairy tale, the enchantment we feel, comes not from the psychological meaning of the tale (although this contributes to it) but from its literary qualities-the tale itself as a work of art. — Bruno Bettelheim
The latest literary discussions reflect a struggle between two artistic methods - romanticism and realism, with the latter clearly ascendant for the time being. — Yevgeny Zamyatin
Literature And Art Quotes
The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't. — Jean-Luc Godard
The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't. — JeanLuc Godard
An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Work hard in silence. Let your succes be the noise.
If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it. — Andrew Denton
Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language. — Steven Pinker
How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions? — Polly Toynbee
It is my earnest hope, and indeed the hope of all mankind, that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past... — Douglas MacArthur
We write from life and call it literature, and literature lives because we are in it. — F. Sionil José
Nearly everything that defines much of our daily experiences is consummatory in nature. Yes, we consume products and services. But we also consume life experiences, religious narratives, art, literature, and ideas. — Gad Saad
Man needs music, literature, and painting - all those oases of perfection that make up art - to compensate for the rudeness and materialism of life. — Fernando Botero
Literature History Quotes
I lead no party; I follow no leader. I have given the best part of my life to careful study of Islam, its law and polity, its culture, its history and its literature. — Muhammad Iqbal
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent. — Henry David Thoreau
To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is. — David McCullough
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. — Barbara Tuchman
In the theatre we reach out and touch the past through literature, history and memory so that we might receive and relive significant and relevant human qualities in the present and then pass them on to future generations. — Anne Bogart
Don’t learn literature from a history teacher. — Vijay Kedia
Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers. — Carlos Fuentes
True education does not consist merely in the acquiring of a few facts of science, history, literature, or art, but in the development of character. — David O. Mckay
It’s not rocket science. It’s social science – the science of understanding people’s needs and their unique relationship with art, literature, history, music, work, philosophy, community, technology and psychology. The act of design is structuring and creating that balance. — Clement Mok
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature. — Henry James
Literary Criticism Quotes
How dare anyone, parent, schoolteacher, or merely literary critic, tell me not to act colored. — Arna Bontemps
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion. — T. S. Eliot
Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising. — D. H. Lawrence
The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud. — H. L. Mencken
Literary criticism is generally bunk. Nonsense. Usually based on self-serving post-intellectual bullshit. — John Fante
Strict rules of evidence would destroy psychoanalysis and literary criticism. — Mason Cooley
The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements. — Paul De Man
There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic. — Anne Stevenson
The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive. — Clifford Geertz
The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same. — Clive James
Literary Characters Quotes
The artist must scorn all judgment that is not based on an intelligent observation of character. He must beware of the literary spirit which so often causes a painting to deviate from its true path - the concrete study of nature - to lose itself all too long in intangible speculations. — Paul Cezanne
There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author. The term is 'idiot'. — Larry Niven
A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways-by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art. It is the presence of art in Crime and Punishment that moves us deeply rather than the story of Raskolnikov's crime. — Boris Pasternak
I get sent a lot of scripts which feature him as a kind of all-purpose Victorian literary character and really understand little, if anything, about him, his life or his books. — Simon Callow
Literary lineage is part of your autobiography. The authors are the literary base, the image base, the character base that you bring into your civilian work. Same with film, architecture, music, sports. That's one tributary of the autobiography. — David Biespiel
I think that what I do is a form of pathetic fallacy, the literary trope in which nature is in sympathy with the mood of the story. I connect the physical setting and props in the story to the emotional state of the characters. — Elizabeth Wein
There are fewer and fewer Jews in Ireland, but we still have one of the most famous Jewish characters in literary history, of course, in Leopold Bloom. — Colum McCann
Whether consciously or unconsciously, I felt myself drawn to writing a female character who was pretty flawed and not very virtuous or wonderful or attractive in these ways that throughout literary history we've come to expect female characters to be. — Leni Zumas
In fiction, I have a residual guilt when I focus on story over language or mood or whatever - the more "literary" things. In screenwriting, I don't have that guilt because story is the only thing. Character, dialogue, everything else - they feed into and drive story. — Nick Antosca
A poem is a small machine made of words. . .Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character. — William Carlos Williams
World Literature Quotes
When we no longer have good cooking in the world, we will have no literature, nor high and sharp intelligence, nor friendly gatherings, no social harmony. — Marie-Antoine Careme
But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin. — Aldous Huxley
Literature provides us with the opportunity to escape into fictional worlds that are ultimately rooted in human universals shaped by common biological forces. — Gad Saad
Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you. — Roald Dahl
I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large. — Kenzaburo Oe
The power of literature to foster empathy is one of the most important ways in which it contributes to our understanding of the world. — Martha C. Nussbaum
In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial. — Henry David Thoreau
So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world. — E. O. Wilson
I found that dance, music, and literature is how I made sense of the world... it pushed me to think of things bigger than lifes daily routines... to think beyond what is immediate or convenient. — Mikhail Baryshnikov
I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant. — Marcel Proust
An essay is a work of literary art which has a minimum of one anecdote and one universal idea. — Carol Bly
Code is not like other how-computers-work books. It doesn't have big color illustrations of disk drives with arrows showing how the data sweeps into the computer. Code has no drawings of trains carrying a cargo of zeros and ones. Metaphors and similes are wonderful literary devices but they do nothing but obscure the beauty of technology. — Charles Petzold
Ever since my youth it has disturbed me that of the literary works that survived their own epoch, so many dealt with historical rather than contemporary subjects. — Lion Feuchtwanger
Art, although produced by man's hands, is something not created by hands alone, but something which wells up from a deeper source out of our soul.....My sympathies in the literary as well as in the artistic field are drawn most strongly to those artists in whom I see most the working of the soul. — Vincent Van Gogh
I don't really like to work with literary allusions very much. I never want to be in a position where I'm saying, "You've got to read a lot of other stuff" or "You've got to have had a good education in literature to fully appreciate what I'm doing." — Kazuo Ishiguro
In new work, we need to see the shadow, however faint, of previous literary effort. — Phillip Lopate
The art in photography is literary art before it is anything else: its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial... The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art. — Clement Greenberg
There is a difference between dramatizing your sensibility and your personality. The literary works which we think of as classicsdid the former. Much modern writing does the latter, and so has an affinity with, say, night-club acts in all their shoddy immediacy. — Paul Horgan
The short-story writer knows that he can't proceed cumulatively, that time is not his ally. His only solution is to work vertically, heading up or down in literary space. — Julio Cortazar
I believe my publisher has shown a great deal of faith in me over a lot of years but I'm not prepared to be so arrogant to say that the long-term literary value of my work would compensate them for a financial failure. — Andrew Vachss
One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person. — Robert Morgan
It's still true that literary works by women, gays, and writers of color are often framed as specific, rather than universal, small rather than big, personal or particular rather than socially significant. — Cheryl Strayed
To vest a few fallible men — prosecutors, judges, jurors — with vast powers of literary or artistic censorship, to convert them into what J. S. Mill called a "moral police," is to make them despotic arbiters of literary products. If one day they ban mediocre books as obscene, another day they may do likewise to a work of genius. — Jerome Frank
We are deceiving ourselves if we believe that a literary work written and published in a country where 70 per cent of the population is illiterate, can change the political and social life of the country..it is up to political organization..and not to romantic literature.. to change the present situation. — Zakaria Tamer
Of course Nebraska is a storehouse of literary material. Everywhere is a storehouse of literary material. If a true artist were born in a pigpen and raised in a sty, he would still find plenty of inspiration for his work. The only need is the eye to see. — Willa Cather
The extraordinarily facile and in literary terms long lived works tend to be about ordinary people. Even Sappho writes about the utterly insignificant . What art can do is make the extraordinary more ordinary and ordinary more extraordinary. — Robert Dessaix
The hoary joke in the literary world, based on 'Dreams From My Father,' was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama, he could have made it as a writer. — James Fallows
Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being. — Milan Kundera
Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. And what are you reading, Miss -- -? Oh! it is only a novel! replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda ; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language. — Jane Austen
No publisher should ever express an opinion on the value of what he publishes. That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to decide. I can quite understand how any ordinary critic would be strongly prejudiced against a work that was accompanied by a premature and unnecessary panegyric from the publisher. A publisher is simply a useful middle-man. It is not for him to anticipate the verdict of criticism. — Oscar Wilde
Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon. — D. H. Lawrence
Hash, x. There is no definition for this word - nobody knows what hash is.
Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.
Dictionary, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work. — Ambrose Bierce
These were all middle-class kids from literary backgrounds, joining this sort of train going by, this pop train, jumping on. Whereas the rest of the rock scene, you'll find that there's mostly working-class people. — Kevin Ayers
I'm not against asking the audience to work, but I think what you have now is a sort of gratuitous deconstruction as a result of a fashion of literary deconstructionism indicating that there are no meanings. — Jonathan Miller
During half a century of literary work, I have endeavoured to introduce the philosophy of evolution into the sphere of literature, and to inspire my readers to think in evolutionary terms. — Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
I've got more in common with a three-toed sloth than I have with Winston Churchill. There is no easy comparison with any modern politician. The more you read about him, the more completely amazed you are about what he did - his energy, his literary fecundity, his ability to work - just unbelievable energy. — Boris Johnson
One of the realities for women writers is that sometimes you'll start strong, but as you see people go up the ladder, working in their literary lives, getting prizes and awards and the better teaching gigs, women tend to sort of drop away. — Erin Belieu
It had also been my belief since I started writing fiction that science fiction is never really about the future. When science fiction is old, you can only read it as being pretty much about the moment in which it was written. But it seemed to me that the toolkit that science fiction had given me when I started working had become the toolkit of a kind of literary naturalism that could be applied to an inherently incredible present. — William Gibson
One movement that I find interesting - this is not a movement in poetry necessarily, but there's a movement on a lot of campuses now called eco - criticism. It's a body of theory based on how nature is treated in literary works. That sort of interests me. — Ted Kooser
I do sometimes miss doing that lighter, more humorous work, and I find there's a heavier responsibility that goes along with a literary reputation. You have to start knowing what you're talking about and you have to go have public conversations with writers. That's been pretty intense; I have to really stay on top of things in a way I didn't before. — Alison Bechdel
In Conclusion
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