Quotes on Literature

The evils of mortals are manifold; nowhere is trouble of the same wing seen.

What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up

Too few rejoice at a friend's good fortune.

Learning is pleasurable but doing is the height of enjoyment.

A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.

Using these unnamed sources, if done properly, carefully and fairly, provides more accountability in government.

I would rather do a good hours work weeding than write two pages of my best; nothing is so interesting as weeding. I went crazy over the outdoor work, and at last had to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by the board.

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!

I wonder if anyone else has an ear so tuned and sharpened as I have, to detect the music, not of the spheres, but of earth, subtleties of major and minor chord that the wind strikes upon the tree branches. Have you ever heard the earth breathe?

On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.

What they could do with 'round here is a good war. What else can you expect with peace running wild all over the place? You know what the trouble with peace is? No organization.

The greatest firmness is the greatest mercy.

I want to be distinguished from the rest; to tell the truth, a friend to all mankind is not a friend for me.

There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.

She had a womanly instinct that clothes possess an influence more powerful over many than the worth of character or the magic of manners.

Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness.

Nature never said to me: Do not be poor; still less did she say: Be rich; her cry to me was always: Be independent.

It is more noble by silence to avoid an injury than by argument to overcome it.

The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.