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

Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain—the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed—then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.

Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.

Modern Arabic literature achieved international recognition when Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel prize in 1988 (.....) Mahfouz also rendered Arabic literature a great service by developing, over the years, a form of language in which many of the archaisms and cliches that had become fashionable were discarded, a language that could serve as an adequate instrument for the writing of fiction in these times.

We are lucky in the United States to have our liberal arts system. In most countries, if you go to university, you have to decide for all English literature or no literature, all philosophy or no philosophy. But we have a system that is one part general education and one part specialization. If your parents say you've got to major in computer science, you can do that. But you can also take general education courses in the humanities, and usually you have to.

Literature usually begets literature.

You can say that literature is about topics like love, death, and all that, but I think there is only one topic that applies to all literature and that is belonging.

Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.

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

I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time - and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come.

I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature.

I'm delighted when people respond with passion and readily intensity to my work. Literature is not as the economist would put it a positional good; in other words, there is infinite space for good literature.

If you focus on literature through only one small element of it, like the more scientific element of linguistics, then where is the joy that brought us literature in the first place, which is to have a story?

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.

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.

Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function.

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature…literature should be left to essayists.

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.

I hate everything that does not relate to literature, conversations bore me (even if they relate to literature), to visit people bores me, the sorrows and joys of my relatives bore me to the very soul. Conversation takes the importance, the seriousness, the truth, out of everything I think.

I think about Chilean literature as a family, because I grew up reading the literature of my country. I feel like I have fathers and stepfathers and a lot of brothers and sisters and distant cousins and all that.

For this reason, to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one's literary education very incomplete.

Some years ago John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in an essay on his efforts at writing a history of economics: 'As one approaches the present, one is filled with a sense of hopelessness; in a year and possibly even a month, there is now more economic comment in the supposedly serious literature than survives from the whole of the thousand years commonly denominated as the Middle Ages ... anyone who claims to be familiar with it all is a confessing liar.' I believe that all physicists would subscribe to the same sentiments regarding their own professional literature. I do at any rate.

My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it.

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing — by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature.

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.

You can travel through literature, and you can expand your mind through literature. It's so cheap to buy that kind of ticket.

The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it....we see literature best from the midst of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a high religion. The field cannot be well seen from within the field.

Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.

Literature is breathing. I teach literature the way someone else might teach First Aid.

I have a passion for children's literature. Young adult literature. I love it. I've always loved it.

Everybody has a different idea of when those good old days were, but everyone is convinced that there was a time when literature really mattered and that it doesn't now. They also tend to believe that it really matters someplace else - in very improbable places often. Russia is someone's idea of a place where literature really counts.

Literature is always what the dominant ideology recognizes as literature.

Painting is literature in colors. Literature is painting in language.

Children’s literature must build a bridge between the colorful dream world full of fantasy and illusion, and a tougher real world full of twists and turns. The child armed with the torch of knowledge, awareness and guidance must cross this bridge and set foot to the intense harshness of the bigger world.

Nervous states of the worst sort control me without pause. Everything that is not literature bores me and I hate it. I lack all aptitude for family life except, at best, as an observer. I have no family feeling and visitors make me almost feel as though I were maliciously being attacked.

Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don't exist...

Encourage good music and art and literature in your homes. Homes that have a spirit of refinement and beauty will bless the lives of your children forever.

There are lots of unlikable characters in literature. It doesn't mean they're not fascinating.

The Bible is still loved by millions, read by millions, and studied by millions. It remains the most published and most read book in the world of literature.

The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.

Everything that is printed and bound in a book contains some echo at least of the best that is in literature.

I remember my emotions the day we watched Nelson Mandela walk out of prison Writing & literature in South Africa during the anti-apartheid years, became a 'cultural weapon.' You had to use it to fight apartheid & some of us resisted that in the end, you recognize that you are facing a government that has no scruples about using culture & art to oppress you.

Keats, it must be remembered, was a sensualist. His poems ... reveal him as a man not altogether free from the vulgarities of sensualism, as well as one who was able to transmute it into perfect literature.

Every time somebody writes a theory about where literature's going, that person is not only contributing thought but nudging things to happen in one way or the other. Just as in painting, there's much more interest in the American scene painters and the early American... like the Ashcan school of painters. Who would have thought, 50 years ago, that Norman Rockwell would again be considered a serious painter? And yet, there are a lot of people who are saying Rockwell was a very accomplished technician. These things are constantly moving.

Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.

According to Muslim teachings, God first revealed His word in the Holy Qur'an to the prophet, Muhammad, during the month of Ramadan. That word has guided billions of believers across the centuries, and those believers built a culture of learning and literature and science. All the world continues to benefit from this faith and its achievements.

He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.

A well-read writer, with good taste, is one who has the command of the wit of other men; he searches where knowledge is to be found; and though he may not himself excel in invention, his ingenuity may compose one of those agreeable books, the deliciæ of literature, that will out-last the fading meteors of his day.