Quotes About Literature

Literature must become party literature. Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat.

It seems to me that literature is giving way a little bit to the immediacy of other diversions, other forms of entertainment. What will it be in fifty years? I don't know. Will there be printed books? Probably, but I'm not sure. There's always going to be literature, though. I believe that. I think literature has a way of getting deep into people and being essential. Literature has its own powers.

Obviously, everything has always been defined by the dominant ideology. But the dominant ideology has been able to accept women's literature as well as men's literature. I would say that women have been hindered from creating for a variety of reasons, as Virginia Woolf so admirably explained in A Room of One's Own. When they have created, on the whole they have been recognized. In literature it hasn't been nearly as oppressive as in, say, painting, where even the existence of so many women painters has always been denied.

In the same period, Polish literature also underwent some significant changes. From social-political literature, which had a great tradition and strong motivation to be that way, Polish literature changed its focus to a psychological rather than a social one.

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

One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue: responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another.

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.

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.

Literature got me into this mess and literature is going to have to get me out of it.

We need literature because we wouldn’t fully know ourselves without it. We need good literature to be fully human.

The point about sales is relevant because it suggests there are cultures out there that are supporting and consuming, on a vast scale, challenging works of literature. Works of literature that in the United States would sell only a few thousand copies, if they managed to find a publisher at all. The success of these texts in Spain or Italy or wherever contributes to a kind of national conversation that we're perhaps not having here in the U.S.

Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.

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.

When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign - a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don't want to hear the word mentioned.

I always thought books were just the canon, things I couldn't identify with. And then I was introduced to really amazing multicultural literature - it was all things I was trying to do unsuccessfully in my poetry. It really just changed everything. I was introduced to authors like Sandra Cisneros, Gabriel García Márquez, Junot Díaz, and a lot of African American literature, as well.

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

Ideas are interesting to me, and religions are a place where ideas have been very subtly embodied for thousands of years. All literature started as sacred literature.

[Bob Dylan] is principally a recording artist, and if he weren't, it is unthinkable he would have had such an impact. He is to be heard first and read second. Well, what about plays, you could reasonably ask. Is [William] Shakespeare not great literature? Yes, obviously: but his work is great literature even to those who have never known it performed. The same is evidently not true of Dylan.

I agree that one can't dispense with the reins and the whip altogether, for knaves find their way even into literature, but no thinking will discover a better police for literature than the critics and the author's own conscience.

My life has had a lot of fits and starts: before I studied literature at all I was a musician, and began undergrad as a conservatory student. I started studying literature in my third year of college, when I took a poetry course with James Longenbach that was pretty extraordinary. It changed my life.

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.

When I was in high school I found literature and history interesting, but science not at all. Literature and history obviously involved thinking, but science seemed to be all about memorizing facts and doing mindless calculations.

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?'

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.

Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair. Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species. --speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1962

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.

It is customary for the recipient of this award to offer personal or scholarly comment on the nature and the direction of literature. At this particular time, however, I think it would be well to consider the high duties and the responsibilities of the makers of literature.

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.

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.

And all over the world, the old literature, the popular literature, is the same. It consists of very dignified sorrow and very undignified fun. Its sad tales are of broken hearts; its happy tales are of broken heads.

Jesus claimed He had the power to raise himself from the dead and His followers would be raised from the dead. That's a unique claim in the literature of religion.

Greek mathematics is the real thing. The Greeks first spoke a language which modern mathematicians can understand... So Greek mathematics is 'permanent', more permanent even than Greek literature.

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

Funny thing about Bob Dylan, the newest Nobel laureate in literature: He's been a master of self-invention for more than 50 years, creating personae, wearing them like masks, and then discarding them as soon as they grew too familiar.

Science is a limited way of knowing, looking at just the natural world and natural causes. There are a lot of ways human beings understand the universe - through literature, theology, aesthetics, art or music.

Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none

Rhetoric takes no real account of the art in literature and morality takes no account of the art in life.

I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!

There is nothing like literature: I lose a cow, I write about her death, and my writing pays me enough to buy another cow.

I am not recommending "popular" literature which aims at the lowest.

I'm often drawn to darker subjects. There's a lot of awful stuff in literature - and in life. Every day I read the paper and think how much I'd love certain people to just go away. But the flipside is that much of life is really good and sweet and tender and true. That's another thing pets teach us. That, and the importance of holding on to those good things in life.

My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

Words have their genealogy, their history, their economy, their literature, their art and music, as too they have their weddings and divorces, their successes and defeats, their fevers, their undiagnosable ailments, their sudden deaths. They also have their moral and social distinctions.

Isn't connecting people to distant lands and culture one of the strengths of good literature?

I'm very aware of how much movies, literature and art affect culture. They are a reflection of the world around us and they are also a means by which we engage with the world around us.

Diversity in literature is, in part, about representation - who is telling the stories and who stories are told about.