Quotes on Literature

Never be ashamed! There's some who'll hold it against you, but they're not worth bothering with.

I prefer unlucky things. Luck is vulgar. Who wants what luck would bring? I don't.

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.

Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.

Celebrity is the chastisement of merit and the punishment of talent.

Every murderer is probably somebody's old friend.

A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.

I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

To narrate is to give oneself: it seems obvious that literature, as an effort to communicate fully, will continue to be blocked so long as misery and illiteracy exist, and so long as the possessors of power continue to carry on with impunity their policy of collective imbecilization through the mass media.

The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.

Leisure without literature is death and burial alive.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

Life in the true sense is perceiving or thinking.

The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

Who never doubted, never half believed. Where doubt is, there truth is - it is her shadow.

The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

Humans have a knack for choosing precisely the things that are worst for them.

Sexually progressive cultures gave us literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust.

His priority did not seem to be to teach them what he knew, but rather to impress upon them that nothing, not even... knowledge, was foolproof.