Quotes on Literature

He that studies books alone, will know how things ought to be; and he that studies men, will know how things are.

That's the thing about suicide. Try as you might to remember how a person lived his life, you always end up thinking about how he ended it.

It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir.

I would rather drudge out my life on a cotton plantation, till the grave opened to give me rest, than to live with an unprincipled master and a jealous mistress.

For truth has such a face and such a mien, as to be loved needs only to be seen.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to entertain, to make things up. The art of what I do lies not in research or even recollection but primarily in invention.

But far more numerous was the herd of such, Who think too little, and who talk too much.

Forgiveness to the injured does belong; but they ne'er pardon who have done wrong.

It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

It is good to follow one's own bent, so long as it leads upward.

It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.

Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.

The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.

You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way... people look at reality, then you can change it.

Iraq is just a symbol of the attitude of western democracies to the rest of the world.

Whatever the reason, for most of the present century, the literature and publicity of the old established [animal welfare] groups made a significant contribution to the prevailing attitude that dogs and cats and wild animals need protection, but other animals do not. Thus people came to think of "animal welfare" as something for kindly ladies who are dotty about cats, and not as a cause founded on basic principles of justice and morality.

All literature, is, finally autobiographical.

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.

I could be a bit of a pain in the arse. Since I've come out of my cancer, I must say I intend to be even more of a pain in the arse.

And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?

The world dies over and over again, but the skeleton always gets up and walks.