Quotes on Literature

I would rather be ignorant than knowledgeable of evils.

In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act.

From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.

Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do it well; whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself completely; in great aims and in small I have always thoroughly been in earnest.

Equality may be a right, but no power on earth can convert it into fact.

Knowledge is love and light and vision.

The wing of the Falcon brings to the king, the wing if the crow brings him to the cemetery.

Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.

Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none

There's hostility to lying, and there should be.

Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself.

A man's love, till it has been chastened and fastened by the feeling of duty which marriage brings with it, is instigated mainly by the difficulty of pursuit.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

I have never been able to look upon America as young and vital but rather as prematurely old, as a fruit which rotted before it had a chance to ripen.

It's so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked.

Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.

If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins.

No literature is complete until the language it was written in is dead.

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.

What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature.

Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got.