Literature Quotes

"Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues"

Phillips Brooks, Clergyman

"Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor"

William O. Douglas, Judge

"Literature is my calling To hold up the mirror to my countrymen comes natural to me; and in the open field of invention I am not without hopes of giving them pleasure"

Thomas Edward Brown, Poet

"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill"

Barbara Tuchman, Historian

"Well, you sort of get out of the pool room, you get out of the Marine Corps, you get out and read some literature, you become involved with people who also want to know and are ready to share some ideas about literature and thoughts, and it becomes nourished that way"

Harvey Keitel, Actor

"Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions"

A. E. Housman, Poet

"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"

Andrzej Wajda, Director

"That helped me to keep in touch with myself and to keep in touch with this really quite extraordinary language and literature into which I had pushed a little way"

Robert Fitzgerald, Author

"I was guilty of judging capitalism by its operations and socialism by its hopes and aspirations; capitalism by its works and socialism by its literature"

Sidney Hook, Philosopher

"Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language"

Steven Pinker, Scientist

"You get below the Mason-Dixon line and you have some of the best music, culture, the two races, the literature, and it's so rich"

Robert Duvall, Actor

"An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence"

Raymond Chandler, Writer

"Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer"

Mark Haddon, Novelist

"A particularly fine head on a man usually means that he is stupid; particularly deep philosophers are usually shallow thinkers; in literature, talents not much above the average are usually regarded by their contemporaries as geniuses"

Robert Musil, Writer

"I'd probably want to teach at university, because children would drive me insane. I suspect it would be English literature, Shakespeare and so forth. I've always been deeply, deeply in love with that kind of thing"

Stephen Fry, Comedian

"When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language"

James Earl Jones, Actor

"There are those who believe we have need of more literature, of a large international publishing house, of a great peace newspaper, or the like. I am rather skeptical about this idea"

Fredrik Bajer, Writer

"Literature precedes genre"

Rick Moody, Novelist

"Indeed; peace literature is almost exclusively read, though to good effect, by pacifists, while what is needed is the canvassing of those who have not so far been won to the cause"

Fredrik Bajer, Writer

"Even before Europe was united in an economic level or was conceived at the level of economic interests and trade, it was culture that united all the countries of Europe. The arts, literature, music are the connecting link of Europe"

Dario Fo, Playwright

"Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past"

Andrzej Wajda, Director

"I had an older brother who was very interested in literature, so I had an early exposure to literature, and and theater. My father sometimes would work in musical comedies"

Francis Ford Coppola, Director

"Literature is the best way to understand the soul of a nation"

Ismail Kadare, Novelist

"What hadn't been realized in the literature until now is that merely to describe how severely something has been tested in the past itself embodies inductive assumptions, even as a statement about the past"

Robert Nozick, Philosopher

"I never wanted to become an actress because I'd read great literature or seen great Shakespeare. It was more just wanting to understand what the people were really like, why they said all the strange things they did"

Julie Walters, Actress

"The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective"

Harold Bloom, Critic

"Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions"

Iris Murdoch, Author

"What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering"

Harold Bloom, Critic

"I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are"

Jose Saramago, Writer

"Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on"

David Brin, Author

"I didn't choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to the place"

Helen Dunmore, Poet

"We shall suffer no attachment to literature, no taste for abstract discussion, no love of purely intellectual theories, to seduce us from our devotion to the cause of the oppressed, the down trodden, the insulted and injured masses of our fellow men"

George Ripley, Activist

"I studied literature design and fashion design"

Danielle Steel, Novelist

"The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart"

Ryszard Kapuscinski, Journalist

"Don't ask to live in tranquil times. Literature doesn't grow there"

Rita Mae Brown, Writer

"Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood"

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Novelist

"There are even more statues of Robert Burns than of any other figure in world literature. Indeed if we discount figures of religion, then only Christopher Columbus has more statues than he worldwide"

Len G. Murray, Lawyer

"Examples one finds in the philosophical literature are somebody who's seen the trial of a child of theirs, where they're being proved guilty of some crime that would drive the parent into a depression, maybe a suicidal depression"

Robert Nozick, Philosopher

"What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is"

Jonathan Miller, Entertainer

"I began as a boy with artistic talent... as a visual artist... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature"

Russell Banks, Author

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