Quotes on Literature

Life is God's novel. Let him write it.

I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.

All brave men love; for he only is brave who has affections to fight for, whether in the daily battle of life, or in physical contests.

Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.

If we doubt the power of literature and art to civilise, how come no one has ever been mugged by a person carrying a well-thumbed copy of 'Middlemarch' in his back pocket?

Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship.

Credit is a system whereby a person who can not pay gets another person who can not pay to guarantee that he can pay.

Activities that promote mind-wandering, such as reading literature, going for a walk, exercising, or listening to music, are hugely restorative.

As we have sought through the centuries to define ourselves as human beings and as nations through the prisms of history and literature, no small part of that effort has drawn us to the subject of war. We might even say that the humanities began with war and from war, and have remained entwined with it ever since.

I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.

I think the job of writing and literature is to encourage each one of us to believe that we're living in a story.

Honor and shame from no condition rise. Act well your part: there all the honor lies.

Reduced... to a crude formula, the Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of the minority.

What makes art in general, and literature in particular, remarkable, what distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor repetition. In everyday life, you can tell the same joke thrice and, thrice getting a laugh, become the life of the party. In art, though, this sort of conduct is called 'cliche.'

In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.

Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.

Black children need to see their lives reflected in the books they read. If they don't, they won't feel welcome in the world of literature. The lives of African-Americans are rich and diverse, and the books our children read should reflect that.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

One word _x000D_ _x000D_ Frees us of all the weight and pain of life:_x000D_ _x000D_ That word is love.