Quotes About Literature

Literature cannot develop between the categories "permitted"—"not permitted"—"this you can and that you can't." Literature that is not the air of its contemporary society, that dares not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers, such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a facade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as waste paper instead of being read. -Letter to the Fourth National Congress of Soviet Writers

I have . . . a deep concern with the development of a literature worthy of our past, and of our destiny; without which literature certainly, we can never come to much. I have a deep concern with the development of an audience worthy of such a literature.

All great popular literature today one day will be seen as great literature and will no longer be seen as popular literature.

The amplification of our diverse literary voices is a political act of resistance. Our lives are important, too. Our lives should be represented in our literature. And that literature is vital, compelling, and accessible. That literature deserves to be disseminated and noticed and available. And with respect to the dissemination and promotion of diverse voices - librarians, educators, and editors of literary journals play such an important role. They deserve not only a hearty shout out, but also our thanks and support.

I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom.

My job is unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling, which is literature. Since I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else, my job will never take possession of me, it may, however, shatter me completely, and this is by no means a remote possibility.

Very often I hear talk about female literature, or femininity in literature. It's a categorization I am not sure about. Maybe there are a few elements that distinguish women's observations from men's, like the ability to notice some fine details.

Whenever summer rolls around I begin to realize that I'm a complete and utter book snob. In relation to reading, I have absolutely no guilty pleasures at all. No graphic novels. No murder mysteries. My summer read is really no different from my winter read. I know many bookshops and magazines would have me believe that our summer forays are different, but literature is literature, and unfortunately snobbery is snobbery.

Kafka often describes himself as a bloodless figure: a human being who doesn't really participate in the life of his fellow human beings, someone who doesn't actually live in the true sense of the word, but who consists rather of words and literature. In my view, that is, however, only half true. In a roundabout way through literature, which presupposes empathy and exact observation, he immerses himself again in the life of society; in a certain sense he comes back to it.

In fantasy stories we learn to understand the differences of others, we learn compassion for those things we cannot fathom, we learn the importance of keeping our sense of wonder. The strange worlds that exist in the pages of fantastic literature teach us a tolerance of other people and places and engender an openness toward new experience. Fantasy puts the world into perspective in a way that 'realistic' literature rarely does. It is not so much an escape from the here-and-now as an expansion of each reader's horizons.

Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature.

Literature professes to be important while at the same time considering itself an object of doubt. It confirms itself as it disparages itself. It seeks itself: this is more than it has a right to do, because literature may be one of those things which deserve to be found but not to be sought.

Literature has low enough standards. But we can avoid writing the worst literature if we make ourselves ask ourselves, every two or three sentences we write, 'Is that what I really think?'

So often, literature about African people is conflated with literature about African politics, as if the state were somehow of greater import or interest than the individual.

The market literature, which was particularly strong in Igboland, in Onitsha, today it is no longer strong. It is one of the victims of the civil war, that market was actually destroyed and at the end of the war a new Nigeria has struggled to come into being and I believe that what is probably going to replace the market literature might be the video, which they have taken to in a big way, creating dramas. So that may be the next thing way we will see coming out of the local basic level in our society.

If nobody talks about books, if they are not discussed or somehow contended with, literature ceases to be a conversation, ceases to be dynamic. Most of all, it ceases to be intimate. It degenerates into a monologue or a mutter. An unreviewed book is a struck bell that gives no resonance. Without reviews, literature would be oddly mute in spite of all those words on all those pages of all those books. Reviewing makes of reading a participant sport, not a spectator sport.

Some literature is knowledge, some is just data. But if I can get a "happy" ending - which is when for the characters I'm writing about, something happens that they move from wherever they are in the beginning to knowledge or wisdom, they know something they never would have acknowledged or realized if it hadn't been for my book - that for me is what literature does.

I didn't choose literature. Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side.

I think that the Bible as literature should be a compulsory part of the national curriculum.. you can't understand English literature and culture without it. But insofar as theology studies the nature of the divine, it will earn the right to be taken seriously when it provides the slightest, smallest smidgen of a reason for believing in the existence of the divine. Meanwhile, we should devote as much time to studying serious theology as we devote to studying serious fairies and serious unicorns.

Until you can become accountable to yourself and only yourself, you're probably not going to live a fully vital life. So much of literature is about accountability. The moral issues in most novels are about people becoming responsible for their own behaviour. One of the forces against being responsible for your own behaviour is the force of the past, in the way that the past tries to form you.

In any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends ... They are still a minority, though a larger one, who are capable of endorsing such first-hand judgement by genuine personal response.

There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.

"The man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool." Our quote of the day is, from of all people, the Marquis de Sade, the most infamous writer in all of French literature. And by the way, if you recognized that quote, you're sick.

We must strike down the insidious lie that a book is the creation of an individual soul labouring in isolation. We must strike it down because it threatens the overall quality and breadth of American literature.

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.

Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind...The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.

There are, it is true, at present no great prizes in literature such as are offered by the learned professions, but there are quite as many small ones - competences; while, on the other hand, it is not so much of a lottery.

The only reward to be expected from literature is contempt if one fails and hatred if one succeeds.

I have felt the pain that arises from a recognition of beauty, pain we hold when we remember what we are connected to and the delicacy of our relations. It is this tenderness born out of a connection to place that fuels my writing. Writing becomes an act of compassion toward life, the life we so often refuse to see because if we look too closely or feel too deeply, there may be no end to our suffering. But words empower us, move us beyond our suffering, and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.

Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.

Personal experience is the basis of all real literature.

In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.

The great Cham of literature. (Samuel Johnson)

Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

At a period when Literature was wont to attribute the grief of living exclusively to the mischances of disappointed love or the jealousy of adulterous deceptions, he had said not a word of these childish maladies, but had sounded those more incurable, more poignant and more profound: wounds that are inflicted by satiety, disillusion and contempt in ruined souls tortured by the present, disgusted with the past, terrified and desperate of the future.

The literature of the immediate future will inevitably turn away from painting, whether respectably realistic or modern, and from daily life, whether old or the very latest and revolutionary, and turn to artistically realized philosophy.

A responsibility of literature is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.

This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if he do but search diligently, find the literature suited to his mental powers.

Man needs music, literature, and painting - all those oases of perfection that make up art - to compensate for the rudeness and materialism of life.

That is exactly the writer's problem. What does literature stand for in a hungry world?

Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.

The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.

I was learning book-keeping at the age of 12, but it never stopped me from pursuing literature. Over the years, I grew to love the written word.

[Vathek] has, in parts, been called, but to some judgments, never is, dull: it is certainly in parts, grotesque, extravagant and even nasty. But Beckford could plead sufficient "local colour" for it, and a contrast, again almost Shakespearean, between the flickering farce atrocities of the beginning and the sombre magnificence of the end. Beckford's claims, in fact, rest on the half-score or even half-dozen pages towards the end: but these pages are hard to parallel in the later literature of prose fiction.

Literature is an inquiry into the deepest yearnings of the human spirit.

To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.

This used to be about sex. The literature of my people was pornography, filled with cries for mercy, drama enacted on people without prolonged negotiation, partners engaged in a dance in the middle of a bonfire. Now, it's 300-page manuals about how to make sure nothing bad will happen.