Literature Quotes

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose. (Margaret Atwood)
Literature is news that stays news. View quote
Ezra Pound
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature. View quote
Henry James
In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others. View quote
André Maurois
Journalism is literature in a hurry. View quote
Matthew Arnold
The greatest masterpiece of literature is only a dictionary out of order. View quote
Jean Cocteau
There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature. View quote
Lawrence Durrell
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be read once. View quote
Cyril Connolly
The Bible is literature, not dogma. View quote
George Santayana
Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal. View quote
Françoise Sagan
Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture. (Juan Ramón Jiménez)
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. View quote
Robert Louis Stevenson
To write is to forget. Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life. View quote
Fernando Pessoa
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. View quote
Robert Benchley
Hemingway's remarks are not literature. View quote
Gertrude Stein
If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely. View quote
Don DeLillo
There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer for them, or turn them into literature. View quote
Stephen Stills
What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature. View quote
W. Somerset Maugham
Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor. View quote
William O. Douglas
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes. View quote
Thornton Wilder
Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself. (Henry Miller)
The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it. View quote
Gertrude Stein
Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature. View quote
Paul Valéry
He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it. View quote
Joseph Heller
Anyone who shoots a real gun at you when drunk and angry is simply not husband material, regardless of his taste in literature. View quote
James Tiptree, Jr