Quotes on Literature

As a rule, said Holmes, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify.

London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.

Of all ghosts the ghosts of our old loves are the worst.

We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of it, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.

When men sow the wind it is rational to expect that they will reap the whirlwind.

The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery.

A gentleman will not insult me, and no man not a gentleman can insult me.

Whatever you may say, the body depends on the soul.

I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.

I am a Republican, a black, dyed in the wool Republican, and I never intend to belong to any other party than the party of freedom and progress.

I don't understand why people talk of art as a luxury when it's a mind-altering possibility.

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.

Without literature, life is hell.

I have learned to live each day as it comes, and not to borrow trouble by dreading tomorrow. It is the dark menace of the future that makes cowards of us.

I think competition in any kind of activity like music, art, literature - anything that's not done with a timer - is actually impossible. So, in effect, what you're doing is you're entering the lottery. You're hoping that you play well (and that) you play your best on the day that you're heard, and you're hoping that the people who are judging will like what you do.

The world doesn't need any more mediocrity or hedged bets.

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil. I don't know why. No, I do indeed know why. Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.

We need to stop fighting Christian against Christian. I have no time for anything but trying to love other people. That is a full-time job.

Obsession led me to write. It's been that way with every book I've ever written. I become completely consumed by a theme, by characters, by a desire to meet a challenge.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.