Literature Quotes

"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

"Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become"

C. S. Lewis, Author

"Remarks are not literature"

Gertrude Stein, Author

"Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing"

Thomas Huxley, Scientist

"Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable"

Gertrude Stein, Author

"Hemingway's remarks are not literature"

Gertrude Stein, Author

"Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science"

Thomas Huxley, Scientist

"The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature"

George Orwell, Author

"The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself"

Jim Rohn, Businessman

"The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money"

Samuel Butler, Poet

"Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself"

Samuel Butler, Poet

"The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash"

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Novelist

"The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poet

"That a literature in our time is living is shown in that way that it debates problems"

Georg Brandes, Critic

"Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy"

Christopher Hitchens, Author

"The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature"

Robert Louis Stevenson, Writer

"The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish"

Robert Louis Stevenson, Writer

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

William Ralph Inge, Clergyman

"Literature is the orchestration of platitudes"

Thornton Wilder, Writer

"I lead no party; I follow no leader. I have given the best part of my life to careful study of Islam, its law and polity, its culture, its history and its literature"

Muhammad Iqbal, Poet

"When I was young my Father used to tell me that the two most worthwhile pursuits in life were the pursuit of truth and of beauty and I believe that Alfred Nobel must have felt much the same when he gave these prizes for literature and the sciences"

Frederick Sanger, Scientist

"Were I more conversant with literature and its great names, I could go on quoting them ad infinitum and acknowledge my debt for the merit you have been generous enough to find in my work"

Knut Hamsun, Author

"The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible"

Washington Irving, Writer

"Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature"

Paul Valery, Poet

"I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature"

John Steinbeck, Author

"It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression"

Alfred North Whitehead, Mathematician

"The instinct to impersonate produces the actor; the desire to provide pleasure by impersonations produces the playwright; the desire to provide this pleasure with adequate characterization and dialogue memorable in itself produces dramatic literature"

George P. Baker

"All literature is gossip"

Truman Capote, Novelist

"Literature is analysis after the event"

Doris Lessing, Writer

"There is only one school of literature - that of talent"

Vladimir Nabokov, Novelist

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

Vladimir Nabokov, Novelist

"A great speech is literature"

Peggy Noonan, Writer

"Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!"

David Herbert Lawrence, Writer

"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"

Isaac Bashevis Singer, Novelist

"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"

Jonathan Lethem, Writer

"Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep"

David Herbert Lawrence, Writer

"Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history"

Octavio Paz, Poet

"Literature is my life of course, but from an ontological point of view. From an existential point of view, I like being a teacher"

Antonio Tabucchi, Writer

"Literature for me isn't a workaday job, but something which involves desires, dreams and fantasy"

Antonio Tabucchi, Writer

"A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature"

John Henry Newman, Clergyman

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