Top 1200 Great Literature Quotes & Sayings - Page 4

My works are Chinese literature, which is part of world literature. They show the life of Chinese people as well as the country's unique culture and folk customs.

Literature is breathing. I teach literature the way someone else might teach First Aid.

The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.

Ideas are interesting to me, and religions are a place where ideas have been very subtly embodied for thousands of years. All literature started as sacred literature.

Once I got into college, I discovered literature - in particular, multicultural literature. I just started to understand the power of story and narrative, and you know, like anyone else, I kind of wanted to do it, too.

In general, literature is a natural adversary of totalitarianism. Tyrannical governments all view literature in the same way: as their enemy. I lived for a long time in a totalitarian state, and I know firsthand that horror.

Literature incarnates its meanings as concretely as possible. The knowledge that literature gives of a subject is the kind of knowledge that is obtained by (vicariously) living through an experience.

I'm an enormous fan of American literature, and especially the great novels of Larry McMurtry, 'Lonesome Dove,' Cormac McCarthy, Elmore Leonard.

Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature.

There's this idea that if you want to write, you shouldn't study literature because then you're dissecting what you love, and you should keep your love of literature pure. I think that's kind of silly.

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature…literature should be left to essayists.

You can travel through literature, and you can expand your mind through literature. It's so cheap to buy that kind of ticket.

It is customary for the recipient of this award to offer personal or scholarly comment on the nature and the direction of literature. At this particular time, however, I think it would be well to consider the high duties and the responsibilities of the makers of literature.

Literature has low enough standards. But we can avoid writing the worst literature if we make ourselves ask ourselves, every two or three sentences we write, 'Is that what I really think?'

The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.

Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.

Take the time to discover how African-Americans have had a great impact on this country. In science, education, literature, art, and politics.

...I have come to make distinctions between what I call the academy and literature, the moral equivalents of church and God. The academy may lie, but literature tries to tell the truth.

Literature got me into this mess and literature is going to have to get me out of it.

In Britain, the great hidden secret of talking animals and children's literature is how political it was in its bones, beneath the obvious cuteness.

Literature has as one of its principal allures that it tells you something about life that life itself can't tell you. I just thought literature is a thing that human beings do.

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.

The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.

Margaret Atwood was the author who took me out of children's literature and guided me towards adult literature.

I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else.

I look at western literature and especially North American literature, and I feel like it gets bogged down so much with all of that, with domestic stories and relationships and a woman dealing with the loss of her husband.

I had an older brother who was very interested in literature, so I had an early exposure to literature, and and theater. My father sometimes would work in musical comedies.

I went to Princeton to major in comparative literature. I never went to film school, but I studied storytelling across mediums - poems, literature, film, and journalism.

I was editing Canadian Literature. I didn't want to let Canadian Literature go, so they reached a nice compromise by which I received half a professor's salary.

Writer's make national literature, while translators make universal literature.

I do lots of reading and speaking at many universities about literature and also about politics, which is as much a part of my life as the literature.

I wasn't reading it [the Bible] as literature. I was reading it as literature, and as history, and as a moral guide, and as anthropology and law and culture.

In India, not enough importance is given to writing for children. And what could be more important than the enrichment of young minds with great literature?

What is literature, really? Boiled down to a single sentence, I'd say it's this: an endless conversation about what it means to be human. And to read literature is to engage in that conversation.

Every great literature has always been allegorical - allegorical of some view of the whole universe. The 'Iliad' is only great because all life is a battle, the 'Odyssey' because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle.

It is a fact that the classics of Yiddish literature are also the classics of the modern Hebrew literature.

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.

Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

In my case, literature is a kind of revenge. It's something that gives me what real life can't give me - all the adventures, all the suffering. All the experiences I can only live in the imagination, literature completes.

Hindu religious literature, indeed all religious literature, is full of illustrations to prove the truth.

I think literature can make familiar the unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar is very much about the dispossessed, and so the value of literature seems to me to go into the stories that not everybody wants to tell.

We do literature a real disservice if we reduce it to knowledge or to use, to a problem to be solved. If literature solves problems, it does so by its own inexhaustibility, and by its ultimate refusal to be applied or used, even for moral good. This refusal, indeed, is literature's most moral act. At a time when meanings are manifold, disparate, and always changing, the rich possibility of interpretation--the happy resistance of the text to ever be fully known and mastered--is one of the most exhilarating products of human culture.

I'm delighted when people respond with passion and readily intensity to my work. Literature is not as the economist would put it a positional good; in other words, there is infinite space for good literature.

English is, from my point of view as an Americanist, an ethnicity. And English literature should be studied in Comparative Literature. And American literature should be a discipline, certainly growing from England and France, Germany, Spain, Denmark, and the Native traditions, particularly because those helped form the American canon. Those are our backgrounds. And then we'd be doing it the way it ought to be done. And someday I hope that it will be.

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.

Literature makes history come to life. It is maybe the most accurate depiction of history, especially literature that was written in the time period depicted in the story.

The problem with the screenplay is that it's not literature, and it's not a film. It's a very weird, technical kind of blueprint that will be absolutely transformed into something else that is not that, you know? Honestly, a screenplay is no literature.

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.

'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature, written by the great poet Basho in 1689.

Food-addiction, or food-drunkenness, is an old story in Hygienic literature. This is the first mention I have seen of it in "regular" medical literature. I fear to hope that its recognition spells progress.

Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.

Literature is an ethical leap. It is a moral decision. A perilous exercise in constant failure. Literature should have grievances, because there are so many grievances in the world.

National literature does not mean much these days; now is the age of world literature, and every one must contribute to hasten thearrival of that age.

When we seem to have won or lost in terms of certainties, we must, as literature teachers in the classroom, remember such warnings -- let literature teach us that there are no certainties, that the process is open, and that it may be altogether salutary that it is so.

The writer asks himself, 'Can I think of a plot that will parallel this? Can I take this work of literature as an example of something I might produce?' Let us, then, consider literature as a productive science.

The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school life because of the great importance attaching to literature seems to be a perversion.

To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.

I agree that one can't dispense with the reins and the whip altogether, for knaves find their way even into literature, but no thinking will discover a better police for literature than the critics and the author's own conscience.

A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books.