Top 1200 Best Literature Quotes & Sayings

Exciting literature after supper is not the best digestive.

Literature is a far more ancient and viable thing than any social formation or state. And just as the state interferes in literature, literature has the right to interfere in the affairs of state.

Literature must become party literature. Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat.

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.

People may think of Southern humor in terms of missing teeth and outhouse accidents, but the best of it is a rich vein running through the best of Southern literature.

South African literature is a literature in bondage. It is a less-than-fully-human literature. It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from prison.

Holden Caulfield is the best character in literature, period.

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

Literature can no longer be either Mimesis or Mathesis but merely Semiosis, the adventure of what is impossible to language, in a word: Text (it is wrong to say that the notion of 'text' repeats the notion of 'literature': literature represents a finite world, the text figures the infinite of language).

Reality is not an inspiration for literature. At its best, literature is an inspiration for reality.

No one spoke in terms of children's literature, as opposed to adult literature, until around the 1940s. It wasn't categorised much before then. Even Grimm's tales were written for adults. But it is true that ever since 'Harry Potter' there has been a renaissance in fantasy literature. J. K. Rowling opened the door again.

Literature cannot develop between the categories "permitted"—"not permitted"—"this you can and that you can't." Literature that is not the air of its contemporary society, that dares not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers, such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a facade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as waste paper instead of being read. -Letter to the Fourth National Congress of Soviet Writers

Sartre said that wars were acts and that, with literature, you could produce changes in history. Now, I don't think literature doesn't produce changes, but I think the social and political effect of literature is much less controllable than I thought.

Russian literature, like colonial Canadian literature, comes with a lot of landscape backdrop.

I belong to Russian literature, but I am an American citizen, and I think it's the best possible combination.

It seems to me that literature is giving way a little bit to the immediacy of other diversions, other forms of entertainment. What will it be in fifty years? I don't know. Will there be printed books? Probably, but I'm not sure. There's always going to be literature, though. I believe that. I think literature has a way of getting deep into people and being essential. Literature has its own powers.

I think literature is best when it's voicing what we would prefer not to talk about.

To me, cinema is cinema. Cinema is one big tree with many branches. The same as literature. In literature, you don't just say, 'Oh, I bought some literature.' No, you say, 'I bought a novel' by so-and-so, or a book of essays by so-and-so.

The press is the exclusive literature of the million; to them it is literature, church, and college.

The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it....we see literature best from the midst of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a high religion. The field cannot be well seen from within the field.

A critic at best is a waiter at the great table of literature.

I think that the best literature has a core that you can't lock to a time or place but that can generate lots of meanings and translations.

What we lack is a basic willingness to see literature as providing some kind of necessary foundation. Our society still expects schools to prepare their charges for work only and not for life. As such, literature is construed as at best technically useless and random, at worst socially disruptive.

No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.

I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.

The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend on it for their daily bread and the highest form of literature, Poetry, brings no wealth to the singer.

A foreign country can best be understood through its literature.

Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.

Literature, the study of literature in English in the 19th century, did not belong to literary studies, which had to do with Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, but instead with elocution and public speaking. So when people read literature, it was to memorize and to recite it.

If you read Islamic creationist literature, it's pretty much lifted from American evangelical literature.

The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.

I'm kind of a reluctant Anglophile. My mother's a children's librarian, and all of the children's literature I read was from her childhood - E. Nesbit and Dickens, which isn't children's literature at all, but I was sort of steeped in English literature. I thought I was of that world.

I think if German literature could survive the '40s and Russian literature could survive Sovietism, American literature can survive Google.

Literature is the best way to overcome death.

In my profession it isn’t a question of telling good literature from bad. Really good literature is seldom appreciated in its own day. The best authors die poor, the bad ones make money — it’s always been like that. What do I, an agent, get out of a literary genius who won’t be discovered for another hundred years? I’ll be dead myself then. Successful incompetents are what I need.

Any literature, when it arrives at being good literature, transcends genre.

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.

Most British playwrights of my generation, as well as younger folks, apparently feel somewhat obliged to Russian literature - and not only those writing for theatres. Russian literature is part of the basic background knowledge for any writer. So there is nothing exceptional in the interest I had towards Russian literature and theatre. Frankly, I couldn't image what a culture would be like without sympathy towards Russian literature and Russia, whether we'd be talking about drama or Djagilev.

Of course, at their best, movies are anti-literature and, as a medium, belong not to writers, not to actors, but to directors.

Living in literature and love is the best thing there is. You're always home.

I have a passion for children's literature. Young adult literature. I love it. I've always loved it.

In French literature, you can choose a la carte; in Spanish literature, there is only the set meal.

To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like

As for literature – to introduce children to literature is to install them in a very rich and glorious kingdom, to bring a continual holiday to their doors, to lay before them a feast exquisitely served. But they must learn to know literature by being familiar with it from the very first. A child's intercourse must always be with good books, the best that we can find.

The important thing is to do what you most love in the best way. If you love literature, you could be a great writer and perhaps one day become a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature.

Literature is the best way to overcome death. My father, as I said, is an actor. He's the happiest man on earth when he's performing, but when the show is over, he's sad and troubled. I wish he could live in the eternal present, because in the theater everything remains in memories and photographs. Literature, on the other hand, allows you to live in the present and to remain in the pantheon of the future. Literature is a way to say, I was here, this is what I thought, this is what I perceived. This is my signature, this is my name.

One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue: responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another.

To my mind that literature is best and most enduring which is characterized by a noble simplicity.

All our forms are unique - movies, music and literature - and you have to leave the person who is doing it to do their best.

It's not that a literature for children of color doesn't exist; it's that so much of the extant literature is lacking in the essential quality that makes literature for children so extraordinary a form: imagination.

When I was at school, I was terrible at algebra and arithmetic, but I was always the best at English and literature. And acting, of course.

Considering that "literary fiction" is a sub-genre that's not quite the same as "literature," either, it follows that the short, semi-humorous bits posted online for all to see are something absolutely other, uniquely themselves compared to canonical short stories, for example, and so it'd probably be best to call it something other than "online lit" since I honestly think very little of it can compare to so-called "literature."

I am fine with my books being categorized as African-American literature but I hope they are also considered Haitian-American literature and American literature. All of these things are part of who I am and what I write.

Christ and the life of Christ is at this moment inspiring the literature of the world as never before, and raising it up a witness against waste and want and war. It may confess Him, as in Tolstoi's work it does, or it may deny Him, but it cannot exclude Him; and in the degree that it ignores His spirit, modern literature is artistically inferior. In other words, all good literature is now Christmas literature.

Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince. Auden has a line: "Ports have names they call the sea." Just so will literature describe life familiarly, regionally, in terms life is accustomed to use -- high or low matters not. Literature cannot by this impulse betray the grandeur of its subject -- there is only one subject: What it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical.

For Mythology is the handmaid of literature; and literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.

Nothing is harmful to literature except censorship, and that almost never stops literature going where it wants to go either, because literature has a way of surpassing everything that blocks it and growing stronger for the exercise.

I don't accept the idea that literature can be just entertainment and that there is no consequences of literature in the real world.

Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.

Everything that is printed and bound in a book contains some echo at least of the best that is in literature.