Literature Quotes

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

Bad literature is a form of treason.

Just why I sent it to the publishers would be hard to say, but when I had finished it I felt that it was literature, because it is real and because it was well written. And I know that the world wants such things.

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

And Marx spoke of the fact that socialism will be the kingdom of freedom, where man realizes himself in a way that humankind has never seen before. This was an inspiring body of literature to read.

Only the more rugged mortals should attempt to keep up with current literature.

You know, 20 years... the films of television when it started, the literature, radio in communist countries, they're clean as a whistle; there was no violence, no sex, no drugs, nothing.

Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There's an objective and a subjective camera, like there's a third- and a first-person narrator in literature.

The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.

A lot of performing instincts are involved in the business of direction, but so is analysis and having a sense of literature.

We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.

I thought I'd been condescended to as an Indian - that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing young adult literature.

Postmodernism cost literature its audience.

In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life.

I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

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.

The elegance and the quality - the talent is always in the literature. I start with the word and I base everything on that. It doesn't make any difference to me.

In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at King's, especially the discovery of French and German literature.

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.

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

The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.

In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.

In the history of literature there are many great enduring works which were not published in the lifetimes of the authors. If the authors had not achieved self-affirmation while writing, how could they have continued to write?

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Judaism has always been a strong interest of mine. My two sons speak Hebrew and are familiar with the scriptures and with rabbinic literature. This is the way we live.

What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.