Quotes on Literature

The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

Literature is the immortality of speech.

Sweet it is, when on the high seas the winds are lashing the waters, to gaze from the land on another's struggles.

We ought to thank God for that. Yes, the man who tills the land is more worthy of respect than any.

Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one's friends.

People like to pigeonhole and say, Well, I'm a Washington insider, and you know, that's quite silly. What does that even mean?

But it's important, while we are supporting lessons in respecting others, to remember that many of our youngest kids need to learn to respect themselves. You learn your worth from the way you are treated.

Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.

The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.

A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.

Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.

Art is to be admired rather than explained. The jargon of these sculptors is beyond me. I do not precisely know why I admire a green granite, female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.

I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know.

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.

Literature is news that stays news.

Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.

'Tis not enough your counsel still be true; Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do.