Quotes on Literature

Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason, I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest patterns of human history.

For me, filmmaking combines everything. That's the reason I've made cinema my life's work. In films, painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.

Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.

Each of us is incomplete compared to someone else - an animal's incomplete compared to a person... and a person compared to God, who is complete only to be imaginary.

Only literature could reveal the process of breaking the law - without which the law would have no end - independently of the necessity to create order.

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

It perhaps might be said--if any one dared--that the most worthless literature of the world has been that which has been written by the men of one nation concerning the men of another.

I fell in love, not deep, but I fell several times and then fell out.

Sorrows gather around great souls as storms do around mountains; but, like them, they break the storm and purify the air of the plain beneath them.

God is an unutterable sigh, planted in the depths of the soul.

If the urge to write should ever leave me, I want that day to be my last.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.

Reverence is fatal to literature.

To be perfectly just is an attribute of the divine nature; to be so to the utmost of our abilities, is the glory of man.

The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose.

People often ask me why my style is so simple. It is, in fact, deceptively simple, for no two sentences are alike. It is clarity that I am striving to attain, not simplicity. Of course, some people want literature to be difficult and there are writers who like to make their readers toil and sweat. They hope to be taken more seriously that way. I have always tried to achieve a prose that is easy and conversational. And those who think this is simple should try it for themselves.

One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.

The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain.

We often give our enemies the means for our own destruction.

In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it.