Literature Quotes

As society diversifies, the number of people who read literature is decreasing. It will be difficult for readers to digest my ideas through literature.

If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.

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

Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.

Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honours or of wealth.

The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.

What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Lovers of literature will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism.

The Nobel Prize has given me, for the first time in my life, the feeling that my literature could be appreciated on an international level.

When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.

The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.

He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.

To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.

The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.

I think you can find all the elements that you can find in great literature in mundane experiences.

Take the time to discover how African-Americans have had a great impact on this country. In science, education, literature, art, and politics.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

I've always loved films, always. I studied literature and I went to Columbia in New York and I went to Paris for part of one year and ended up staying there.

Literature and philosophy both allow past idols to be resurrected with a frequency which would be truly distressing to a sober scientist.

I don't think there's a whole lot of class literature at all. I think most of that has become racially based, and people don't think of it as being class literature.

Underground literature only began in the '70s, when technical developments made it possible. Before that, we were involved in a game with the censors. That was our struggle.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

People have different views of how you deal with different issues in literature, and, frankly, long may it last that there is a range of views.

The object of Literature is to instruct, to animate, or to amuse.

It's different in Scotland. People who come to readings are more interested in literature as such, but the readership in general is really quite diverse. It's a cliche, but it's said that people who read my books don't read any other books, and you do get that element.

Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.

Comics? Honestly, that's more a matter of nostalgia for me. I think most of that energy has gone to my love of literature and my love of film.

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