Literature Quotes - page 3

There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness. (George Washington)
While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living. View quote
Cyril Connolly
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the w. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
A man can be a hero if he is a scientist, or a soldier, or a drug addict, or a disc jockey, or a crummy mediocre politician. A man can be a hero because he suffers and despairs; or because he thinks logically and analytically; or because he is "sensitive"; or because he is cruel. Wealth establishes a man as a hero, and so does poverty. Virtually any circumstance in a man's life will make him a hero to some group of people and has a mythic rendering in the culture-in literature, art, theater, or the daily newspapers. View quote
Andrea Dworkin
It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore. View quote
Margaret Fuller
I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art. View quote
P. D. James
Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself. View quote
Samuel Butler (novelist)
Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round. View quote
David Lodge
In science, read, by preference the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern. (Edward Bulwer-Lytton)
What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power. View quote
John Cheever
In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented. View quote
Northrop Frye
Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
Take the sum of human achievement in action, in science, in art, in literature -- subtract the work of the men above forty, and while we should miss great treasurers, even priceless treasures, we would practically be where we are today. . . . The effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty. View quote
William Osler
We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion. View quote
T. S. Eliot
Bruzundanga's literature is ruled by cute, rhyming and tasteless sonnets. View quote
Lima Barreto
I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature. View quote
John Steinbeck
Literature is analysis after the event. View quote
Doris Lessing
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. View quote
Virginia Woolf
I hate brandy...it stinks of modern literature. (Harold Pinter)
Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart. View quote
Salman Rushdie
Today's literature: prescriptions written by patients. View quote
Karl Kraus
Women began their inner emancipation by their access to literature, by access to the world through books; an access they could not have socially or politically, or of course economically, in the world at large. View quote
George Steiner
Literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on, a value judgement of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain. View quote
George Steiner