Quotes on Literature

We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.

In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.

There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it.

When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

The beauty of literature is you allow readers to see things through other peoples eyes. All good books do this.

Money is a handmaiden, if thou knowest how to use it A mistress, if thou knowest not.

Time will bring to light whatever is hidden it will cover up and conceal what is now shining in splendor.

Some wisdom you must learn from one who's wise

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.

Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.

Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by a desire to change his bed.

The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.

Literature is a human apocalypse, man's revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgement of mankind.

To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like