Literature Quotes: Timeless Wisdom and Inspiration

"A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect"

Walter Scott, Novelist

"I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens"

E. B. White, Writer

"The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation"

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Writer

"What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote"

E. M. Forster, Novelist

"Facts are not science - as the dictionary is not literature"

Martin H. Fischer, Author

"Literature is about as unnecessarily necessarily as tableware or ironed shirts"

Peter Bichsel, Writer

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity"

Gilbert K. Chesterton, Writer

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it"

C. S. Lewis, Author

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn"

Ernest Hemingway, Novelist

"The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature"

Alfred North Whitehead, Mathematician

"When the drama attains a characterization which makes the play a revelation of human conduct and a dialogue which characterizes yet pleases for itself, we reach dramatic literature"

George P. Baker

"Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author's soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted"

Robert Benchley, Comedian

"All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what's cool"

Steven Brust, Author

"He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it"

Joseph Heller, Novelist

"What fascinated me mostly about Mickey Cohen was that he, in his later years, hired someone to help him to comprehend literature, to help him to read better, to understand words better"

Harvey Keitel, Actor

"Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature"

Herman Hesse, Author

"It is not Kafka's fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature"

Herman Hesse, Author

"I think Maus I is better than Maus II. The standard here is whether or not it's as good as a great book of prose literature and by that standard, no, it's not that great"

Ted Rall, Cartoonist

"In French literature, you can choose a la carte; in Spanish literature, there is only the set meal"

Jose Bergamin, Writer

"Movies are a complicated collision of literature, theatre, music and all the visual arts"

Yahoo Serious, Director

"When they were done downloading all the information off each hard drive, they took all the computers, all the literature, and loaded everything into a big white truck and left"

Sherman Austin

"Literature has to serve as a moral control of politics"

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Poet

"The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper - whether little or great, it belongs to Literature"

Sarah Orne Jewett, Author

"One of the greatest gifts my brother and I received from my mother was her love of literature and language. With their boundless energy, libraries open the door to these worlds and so many others. I urge young and old alike to embrace all that libraries have to offer"

Caroline Kennedy, Celebrity

"If I could have gone on describing to you the beauties of this region, who knows but I might have made a fine addition to the literature of our age?"

Robert Gould Shaw, Soldier

"Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth"

Edward Dahlberg, Novelist

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

Ernst Fischer, Writer

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

Trevor Nunn, Director

"I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"Literature becomes the living memory of a nation"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"Every man's memory is his private literature"

Aldous Huxley, Novelist

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

Jean-Paul Sartre, Philosopher

"Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others"

Virginia Woolf, Author

"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"

Virginia Woolf, Author

"This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant"

Virginia Woolf, Author

"The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to Literature"

Willa Cather, Author

"It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature"

Henry James, Writer

"Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness"

Helen Keller, Author

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