Quotes on Literature

Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.

I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.

A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance.

Gaiety is a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.

In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do anything more than push it as far as it will go.

Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.

So I have no grounds to complain; on the contrary, writers should consider the condition of permanent controversiality to be invigorating, part of the risk envolved in choosing the profesión. It is a fact of life that writers have always and with due consideration and great pleasure spit in the soup of the high and mighty. That is what makes the history of literature analogous to the development and refinement of censorship.

People praise virtue, but they hate it, they run away from it. It freezes you to death, and in this world you've got to keep your feet warm.

We are constantly railing against the passions; we ascribe to them all of man's afflictions, and we forget that they are also the source of all his pleasures.

There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.

Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.

No theory is good unless it permits, not rest, but the greatest work. No theory is good except on condition that one use it to go on beyond.

No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery.

People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get.

Indeed, in view of its function, religion stands in greater need of a rational foundation of its ultimate principles than even the dogmas of science.

'No Sweetness Here' is the kind of old-fashioned social realism I have always been drawn to in fiction, and it does what I think all good literature should: It entertains you.

If a thing loves, it is infinite.

At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We have jobs, children, partners, debts. This is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks.