Quotes on Literature

What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power.

Is solace anywhere more comforting than that in the arms of a sister.

The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.

This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.

The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.

God isn't the son of Memory; He's the son of Immediate Experience. You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment.

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

Sartre said that wars were acts and that, with literature, you could produce changes in history. Now, I don't think literature doesn't produce changes, but I think the social and political effect of literature is much less controllable than I thought.

Literature is the most beautiful of countries

What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I'd like to be.

Female characters in literature are full. They're messy: they've got runny noses and burp and belch. Unfortunately, in film, female characters don't often have that kind of richness.

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

When the mind withdraws into itself and dispenses with facts it makes only chaos.

There is something so amiable in the prejudices of a young mind, that one is sorry to see them give way to the reception of more general opinions.

But if our sex would but well consider and rationally ponder, they will perceive and find that it is neither words nor place that can advance them, but worth and merit.

I hold that gentleman to be the best-dressed whose dress no one observes.

Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.