Top 1200 World Literature Quotes & Sayings

That love is a conflict seems to me obvious and natural. There isn't a single worthwhile work in world literature based on love that is only about the conquest of happiness, the effort to arrive at what we call love. It's the struggle that has always interested those who produce works of art - literature, cinema or poetry.

As a writer, I live in the world of literature and ideas, but I entered that world as an emigre from a medieval fiefdom, the sports world of Michigan.

It has seemed to me that literature, as I meant it, was embattled, that it was increasingly difficult to find writing doing what I thought literature should do - which was simply to push people into changing their ideas about the world, and to go further, to encourage us in the work of changing the world, to making it more just and more truly human.

I think art, especially literature, has the particular power to immerse the viewer or reader into another world. This is especially powerful in literature, when a reader lives the experience of the characters. So if the characters are human and real enough, then readers will feel empathy for them.

That's really what SF is all about, you know: the big reality that pervades the real world we live in: the reality of change. Science fiction is the very literature of change. In fact, it is the only such literature we have.

American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World.

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 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.

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.

In America there is really very little knowledge of the literature of the rest of the world. Of the literature of Latin America, yes, But that's not all that different in inspiration from that of America, or of Europe. One must go further. You don't even have to go too far in terms of geography - you can start with the Native Americans and listen to their poetry.

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.

Literature delivers tidings of the world within and the world without.

In many parts of the world, including the Arab world, the Latin American world, and even parts of the Western world, there is a tradition of writers being quite engaged. Particularly in the Arab world you have had very, very strong traditions of literature and poetry and most of the writers have been deeply committed to the cause of the Arab nation.

Allen Ginsberg was a world authority on the writing of William Blake, and had an incredible knowledge of classic literature and world politics.

Literary revolution and revolutionary literature did not create a beautiful new world but instead divested literature of its basic nature, promoted violence, and, by resorting to linguistic violence, made a battlefield of this domain of spiritual freedom.

The world of scholarship is much more measured in its appreciation and also its criticism than the world of popular literature.

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.

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

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

And all over the world, the old literature, the popular literature, is the same. It consists of very dignified sorrow and very undignified fun. Its sad tales are of broken hearts; its happy tales are of broken heads.

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

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

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.

I'm not at all snobby about book prizes and how they pollute the world of literature. Just like with the Olympics, a little bit of competition gets people truly engrossed in the business of 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.

There is a clear acknowledgement all over the world that we should not teach people to read and then to leave them without literature. For they would then relapse into a dreary and ultimately dangerous state of half-education, in which they would be easily satisfied by crude semi-pictorial approximations of the strip cartoon and by the abundant supply of degenerate literature which destroys, rather than promotes, a capacity to face the problems of the world with skill and courage

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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, 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.

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

To subvert is not the aim of literature, its value lies in discovering and revealing what is rarely known, little known, thought to be known but in fact not very well known of the truth of the human world. It would seem that truth is the unassailable and most basic quality of literature.

I believe in a kind of literature which makes clear that, at a deeper level, below the surface, we are tied together through invisible but existing threads. A kind of literature which talks about a lively, ever-changing world of unity, of which we are a small, but not insignificant part.

Music, dance, literature and the visual arts open up a rich and intensely rewarding world. It is a world that should not be the preserve of the few.

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.

It is impossible to look into the Bible with the most ordinary attention without feeling that we have got into a moral atmosphere quite different from that which we breathe in the world, and in the world's literature.

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

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.

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.

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 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).

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 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.

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.

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.

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

The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.

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.

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.

The returns we read about in the industry sales literature vastly diminish when we move from the theoretical world of market indexes to the real world of actually investing.

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.

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.

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.

In my first class at the University of Kentucky, my American Literature professor came in, and the first sentence out of his mouth was "The central theme of American Literature is an attempt to reconcile what we've done to the New World." wrote that down in my notebook, and thought, "What is he talking about?" But that's what I think about now. The New World and what we've done to it.

As writers, the world is not about individual expression entirely because we are producing works of literature and getting them out into the world.