167 Literary Quotes to Inspire and Ignite Your Imagination
Literary quotes are insightful statements made by authors, poets, and other literary figures that capture the essence of literature. These quotes highlight the power of words and storytelling, emphasizing the importance of literature in our lives. Whether it is a simple phrase or a profound observation, literary quotes often inspire and provoke thought, encouraging readers to explore the depths of human emotions and experiences through the written word.
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Famous Literary Quotes
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions. — Iris Murdoch
Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture. — Juan Ramon Jimenez
Literature is the question minus the answer. — Roland Barthes
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. — Ezra Pound
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 is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness. — F. R. Leavis
One thing that literature would be greatly the better for Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and>metaphor. — Ogden Nash
The crown of literature is poetry. — W. Somerset Maugham
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
Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A mere literary man is a dull man; a man who is solely a man of business is a selfish man; but when literature and commerce are united, they make a respectable man. — Samuel Johnson
Literature is air, and Im suffocating in mediocrity. — Armand Assante
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
Leisure without literature is death and burial alive. — Seneca The Elder
Leisure without literature is death and burial alive. — Seneca
Short Literary Quotes
- Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world. — Samuel Johnson
- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
- 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
- A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar. — Carolyn Heilbrun
- Verbose is not a synonym for literary. — Constance Hale
- Each time you happen to me all over again. — Edith Wharton
- So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
- I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence. — George Eliot
Literary Image Quotes
Inspirational Literary Quotes
The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
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
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'm also very hopeful to continue my literary journey into the realm of children's books. To be able to read my kids a children's book that was inspired by them would be everything! — Trista Sutter
For popular purposes, at least, the aim of literary artists should be similar to that of Rubens in his landscapes, of which, without neglecting the minor traits or finishing, he was chiefly solicitous to present the leading effect, or what we may call the inspiration. — William Benton Clulow
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 V. Jensen
Beautiful Literary Quotes
I took a photo of us, mid-embrace. When I am old and alone I will remember that I once held something truly beautiful. — Joe Dunthorne
Apostolic preaching is not marked by its beautiful diction, or literary polish, or Cleverness of expression, but Operates “in demonstration of the Spirit and of power. — Arthur Wallis
It is interesting to note that poetry, a literary device whose very construct involves the use of words, is itself the word of choice by persons grasping to describe something so beautiful it is marvelously ineffable. — Vanna Bonta
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
When you read the Koran, you give up. At least the Bible is very beautiful because Jews have an extraordinary literary talent. — Michel Houellebecq
Eric Walrond, handsome, cosmopolitan, and beguilingly enigmatic, may have been the most promising literary talent of the Harlem Renaissance.... James Davis's finely written, beautifully paced Eric Walrond is a major biography of a fascinating figure. — David Levering Lewis
A panel at a beautiful annual literary festival in Brazil, held in the almost Utopian coastal town of Parati, found me matched with Fernando Gabeira. This comparison reduced my own limited charisma value to something like zero: Gabeira has excelled at every cultural activity in Brazil. — Christopher Hitchens
The sneakiest form of literary subtlety, in a corrupt society, is to speak the plain truth. The critics will not understand you; the public will not believe you; your fellow writers will shake their heads. Laughter, praise, honors, money, and the love of beautiful girls will be your only reward. — Edward Abbey
I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it. — Jim Jarmusch
I try to see their moral relevance [in the Bible] and, of course, to admire the literary beauty of the text. Prophetic poetry: No one has written the way Isaiah does. — Elie Wiesel
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
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
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
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
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
Literary Love Quotes
Marie Calloway has a very specific literary personality that the reader is intrigued by: she's masochistic, loves to experiment, is quickly bored and intermittently self-hating, very hip, rebellious. Figuring her out is a gripping adventure. — Edmund White
To Grandma: Once upon a time, there was a boy who flew. — Chris Colfer
Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Whoever heard of a midwife as a literary heroine? Yet midwifery is the very stuff of drama. Every child is conceived either in love or lust, is born in pain, followed by joy or sometimes remorse. A midwife is in the thick of it, she sees it all. — Jennifer Worth
People love gossip because it's slightly removed from actuality. It's a very literary thing... You can hear a great story, and it turns out that it's largely not true. Fiction writing is like gossip. It's not malicious gossip, but it's gossip. — Lorrie Moore
To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life. — Victor Hugo
True education seeks to make men and women not only good mathematicians, proficient linguists, profound scientists, or brilliant literary lights, but also honest men and women with virtue, temperance, and brotherly love. — David O. Mckay
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
He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
If female liberation is to happen, if the reservoir of real female love is to be tapped, this sterile self-deception must be counteracted. The only literary form which could outsell romantic trash on the female market is hard-core pornography. — Germaine Greer
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
An essay is a work of literary art which has a minimum of one anecdote and one universal idea. — Carol Bly
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
Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak. — Salman Rushdie
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 Style 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
A contemporary artist can use the findings of all epochs and all styles, from the most primitive literary expressions up to the most refined products of the baroque. — Juan Goytisolo
Fine writing is a distinct disadvantage. So is unique literary style. They take attention from the subject — Claude C. Hopkins
I no more thought of style or literary excellence than the mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her children from a burning house, thinks of the teachings of the rhetorician or the elocutionist. — Harriet Beecher Stowe
I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits. It is the style of all the writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean to and more than they feel. It is the style of most artists and all humbug. — Cyril Connolly
The New Testament evinces its universal design in its very, style, which alone distinguishes it from all the literary productions of earlier and later times. — Philip Schaff
To my mind, Death in Venice represents an enormous advance in Mann's literary development, not simply for the commonly appreciated reason that he crafted a superbly supple and elegant style, apparently well suited to the kind of prose Aschenbach is supposed to write. — Philip Kitcher
I should say that I'm not conscious of any particular style or any particular literary device when I am writing. I have written 22 books, and they are all very different. I have tried all kinds of genres. — Isabel Allende
All literary style, especially national style, is made up of such coincidences, which are a spiritual sort of puns. That is why style is untranslatable. — Gilbert K. Chesterton
The beat literary movement is strong because of those very challenging and individual relationships and styles and contention and so on. So I just feel blessed by this kind of opportunity that came from it. It was a kind of seed. — Anne Waldman
Literary Genre Quotes
The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. — Jose Saramago
I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner. — Pope Francis
I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre. — Ben Lerner
Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem. — Rick Moody
I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one. — Mark Haddon
The crime genre's always been regarded very well by the literary end of the book world, whereas horror, although it had that spell in the late eighties, by and large, it's sort of ghetto-ized, and considered to be exploited literature. — Peter James
Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it. — Marilyn Hacker
Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish. — Dean Koontz
I spent the first twenty years of my writing career preparing for the mystery genre, which is my favorite literary form. — Sue Grafton
On the subject of literary genres, I've always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I'd love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story. — J. K. Rowling
Literary Theory Quotes
After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was. — Terry Eagleton
I am someone who values truth - actual truth as opposed to "truthiness." I am also someone who has been trained in deconstruction in the literary theory department of Yale University, so I am someone who is tempted to believe that no absolute truth is possible. — John Hodgman
The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination. — Charles Simic
If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades. — Terry Eagleton
You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism. — Terry Eagleton
With a few exceptions, the critics of children's books are remarkably lenient souls.... Most of us assume there is something goodin every child; the critics go from this to assume there is something good in every book written for a child. It is not a sound theory. — Katharine Sergeant Angell White
I used to teach at Yale, which was at one time a center of postmodernist literary theory. Derrida was there. Paul de Man was there. — Harry Frankfurt
It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures. — Terry Eagleton
Literary theories will not make a writer write. — Allen Wier
Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake. — Nancy Pearcey
Literal Quotes
If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves. — Thomas A. Edison
We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. — Enoch Powell
The sea, the great unifier, is man's only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: we are all in the same boat. — Jacques Yves Cousteau
One of the reasons I love to jump back and forth between mediums is that film does allow me to be more literal. I can go to the real place. I can go to the Coliseum, and I don't have to fake it. — Julie Taymor
When a certain number of people come together and they choose at a moment in time to create a precise emotion in their hearts, that emotion literally can intentionally influence the very fields that sustain the life on planet earth. — Gregg Braden
I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real. — Jacques Lacan
My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally. — John Dominic Crossan
No man is hurt but by himself. ...Literally by how he interprets what happens to him. If he focusses on how it could have been better, he will be hurt. If he focusses on how it could have been worse, he will be happy. The same is true for women too. — Diogenes
Every now and then you have like a realization moment where you get goosebumps and think, “I am literally the luckiest person in the world. — Niall Horan
We cannot cheat on DNA. We cannot get round photosynthesis. We cannot say I am not going to give a damn about phytoplankton. All these tiny mechanisms provide the preconditions of our planetary life. To say we do not care is to say in the most literal sense that "we choose death." — Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth
People Writing About Literary
| Name | Quotes | Likes |
|---|---|---|
 F. Scott Fitzgerald |
698 | 8587 |
 Samuel Johnson |
1736 | 7561 |
 Iris Murdoch |
183 | 962 |
 Juan Ramon Jimenez |
19 | 165 |
 Roland Barthes |
154 | 943 |
 Ezra Pound |
226 | 1759 |
More Literary Quotes
I would rather win souls than be the greatest king or emperor on earth; I would rather win souls than be the greatest general that ever commanded an army; I would rather win souls than be the greatest poet, or novelist, or literary man who ever walked the earth. My one ambition in life is to win as many as possible. — R. A. Torrey
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow. — Anais Nin
The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism. Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images. — Camille Paglia
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
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
The Llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat, with an indolent expression and an undulating throat; like an unsuccessful literary man. — Hilaire Belloc
The surrealist thinks he has outstripped the whole of literary history when he has written (here a word that there is no need to write) where others have written "jasmines, swans and fauns." But what he has really done has been simply to bring to light another form of rhetoric which hitherto lay hidden in the latrines. — Jose Ortega y Gasset
Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. — Theodore Sturgeon
The best source for finding an agent is called Literary Agents of North America. It's a complete list of agents, not only by name and address, but by type of book they represent and by what their submission criteria are. — Sara Paretsky
I get invited to many more literary festivals than I used to because I'm associated with 'Slumdog Millionaire,' the brand. Many more doors have opened up for me as a result of the global success of the film, although I believe that I'm the same person that existed before it. — Vikas Swarup
Chocolate is a perfect food, as wholesome as it is delicious, a beneficent restorer of exhausted power...it is the best friend of those engaged in literary pursuits. — Justus von Liebig
It is a fact that unless children are brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, they, and the society which they constitute or control, will go to destruction. Consequently, when a state resolves that religious instruction shall be banished from the schools and other literary institutions, it virtually resolves on self-destruction. — Charles Hodge
Gonzo . . . acidic hilarity . . . 'The Fun Parts' has fine moments, but it's not the whole Lipsyte story. Read it with 'The Ask' if you really want to know how a mordant jokester with a madman's imagination became a literary rock star. — Janet Maslin
I can't help but to write, I have a inner need for it. If I'm not in the middle of some literary project, I'm utterly lost, unhappy and distressed. As soon as I get started, I calm down. — Kaari Utrio
One thing I knew about the novelist’s task: when in doubt, write; when empty, write; when afraid, write. Nothing is more impenetrable than the blank page. The blank page is the void, the absence of sense and feeling, the white light of literary death. — Philip Sington
Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying No to any authority - literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social and even political. — Ignazio Silone
I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip. — John Kennedy Toole
A neurotic can perfectly well be a literary genius, but his greatest danger is always that he will not recognize when he is dull. — Louis Auchincloss
What I can say is that it was clear to many of us that an indigenous African literary renaissance was overdue. A major objective was to challenge stereotypes, myths, and the image of ourselves and our continent, and to recast them through stories- prose, poetry, essays, and books for our children. That was my overall goal. — Chinua Achebe
There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity. — Mario Vargas Llosa
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
All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life. — John Cheever
In Conclusion
Quotes about literary encompass a wide range of topics, including the significance of reading, the beauty of language, and the impact of storytelling. By sharing their thoughts on literature, writers and thinkers offer valuable insights into the art of writing and the transformative nature of books. These quotes serve as a source of inspiration, encouraging people to appreciate the written word and its ability to transport us to different worlds, evoke emotions, and provoke introspection.
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