Literature Quotes - page 2

For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment. (Matthew Arnold)
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. View quote
Oscar Wilde
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. View quote
David Brin
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. View quote
John Cheever
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. View quote
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it. View quote
Václav Havel
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others. View quote
Virginia Woolf
Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary. View quote
Boris Pasternak
It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics. View quote
Richard Dawkins
A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people, as no historical reconstruction can. View quote
Edith Hamilton
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)
Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature. View quote
Jean Cocteau
If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble. View quote
Jean-Paul Sartre
The world would get along very well without literature. It would get along even better without man. View quote
Jean-Paul Sartre
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. View quote
Fredrik Bajer
The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self. View quote
Charles Cooley
If England has any dignity left in the way of literature, she will forget for ever the pitiful antics of English Literature's performing flea. View quote
Sean O`Casey
I think myself I ought to be shot for writing such nonsense.... But it's unquestionably good escapist literature and I think I should rather like it if I were sitting in an air-raid shelter or recovering from flu. View quote
Georgette Heyer
Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship. View quote
Ismail Kadaré
During half a century of literary work, I have endeavoured to introduce the philosophy of evolution into the sphere of literature, and to inspire my readers to think in evolutionary terms. View quote
Johannes V. Jensen
The crown of literature is poetry. (W. Somerset Maugham)
Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century. View quote
J. G. Ballard
I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate. View quote
Marguerite Duras
He is the richest author that ever grazed the common of literature. View quote
Samuel Johnson
Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature. View quote
Paul Ricœur