Top 1200 Great Literature Quotes & Sayings

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.

Sanity -- that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.

I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature.

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.

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.

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.

It's what's missing, I think, from most music - the rebellious part. That rebelliousness is part of great rock music or great literature or any great creative stuff.

Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings.

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.

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.

Our leading men are not of much account and never have been, but the average of the people is immense, beyond all history. Sometimes I think in all departments, literature and art included, that will be the way our superiority will exhibit itself. We will not have great individuals or great leaders, but a great average bulk, unprecedentedly great.

[Bob Dylan] is principally a recording artist, and if he weren't, it is unthinkable he would have had such an impact. He is to be heard first and read second. Well, what about plays, you could reasonably ask. Is [William] Shakespeare not great literature? Yes, obviously: but his work is great literature even to those who have never known it performed. The same is evidently not true of Dylan.

It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.

My job is to get people to write something truthful, something about truth and beauty - wherever they are - and to understand how literature is made. And then if they become great writers, that's great, and probably has nothing to do with me.

Our literature is in great shape.

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

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.

A great speech is literature.

A great piece of literature encompasses all that is and all that will be.

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.

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.

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.

I think technical people now should learn literature, because literature teaches you a great deal about how - the depths and variety of human imagination.

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.

Literature bores me, especially great literature

A great piece of literature does not try to coerce you to believe it or agree with it. A great piece of literature simply is . It is a vehicle of truth, but it is not a blueprint, and we tend to confuse the two.

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.

A people may become great through many means, but there is only one measure by which its greatness is recognized and acknowledged. The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced.... No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior.

Inequality may linger in the world of material things, but great music, great literature, great art and the wonders of science are, and should be, open to all.

The great Cham of literature. (Samuel Johnson)

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.

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.

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.

Great literature has always been written in a like spirit, and is, indeed, the Forgiveness of Sin, and when we find it becoming the Accusation of Sin, as in George Eliot, who plucks her Tito in pieces with as much assurance as if he had been clockwork, literature has begun to change into something else.

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.

Freedom of speech doesn't guarantee great literature.

There will still be things that machines cannot do. They will not produce great art or great literature or great philosophy; they will not be able to discover the secret springs of happiness in the human heart; they will know nothing of love and friendship.

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.

All great art and literature is propaganda.

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.

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

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

To me, characters are at the heart of great literature.

If you read literature, you put yourself in somebody else's shoes. You learn from great figures in literature.

All great popular literature today one day will be seen as great literature and will no longer be seen as popular literature.

I have nothing but great respect for great scholars. But I was in grad school in the '80s and '90s, at the height of the theory craziness. It had a big part in why I ended up becoming a writer rather than a scholar, because I thought, "I just can't play these games." I was interested in literature because I loved literature, and so much of the theoretical positioning, at that moment 25 years ago, was antagonistic to literature. You know, trying to show that Jane Austen is a terrible person because she wasn't thinking about colonialism.

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.

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.

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.

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.

No one bothered reading the books and understanding - and again, I'm not being high-falutin' about it - but I think our books are great literature with great metaphors of real life dealing with fears and hopes.

All great characters, great icons, in literature are a bit of a riddle, and that's the reason we go back to them over and over.

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 have a vision of artists putting into film, drama, literature, music, and paintings great themes and great characters from the Book of Mormon.

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.

Literature has done great work for feminism - writing and reading are a practice of empathy - and great literature will continue to do so.

Literature is the adventure. It's the story, it's the fight, it's people falling in love, it's people with deep personality disorders who succeed anyway beyond themselves. That's what great literature is.

Modern Arabic literature achieved international recognition when Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel prize in 1988 (.....) Mahfouz also rendered Arabic literature a great service by developing, over the years, a form of language in which many of the archaisms and cliches that had become fashionable were discarded, a language that could serve as an adequate instrument for the writing of fiction in these times.

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'm not a great writer of literature. I'm an entertainer.