Literature quotes

Discover profound quotes, timeless classics, and thought-provoking passages. Explore the world of literature, where words have the power to captivate hearts and inspire minds. Delve into a collection of literary masterpieces that beautifully express the complexities and wonders of life.

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Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions.

- John Morley

What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is.

- Jonathan Miller

What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.

- Henry Miller

If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

- Ezra Pound

All literature is political.

- LeVar Burton

But then in April of 1985 the dollar began a sharp decline. The dollar's trade weighted value fell 23 percent in just 12 months and by a total of 37 percent by the beginning of 1988.

- Martin Feldstein

The concept of industry domination of regulatory agencies was well known and documented in the literature by the 1960s.

- Nick Johnson

Postmodernism cost literature its audience.

- Scott Turow

Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature.

- Gao Xingjian

Every man's memory is his private literature.

- Aldous Huxley

Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Literature is about as unnecessarily necessarily as tableware or ironed shirts.

- Peter Bichsel

I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large.

- Kenzaburo Oe

Remarks are not literature.

- Gertrude Stein

Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.

- Roland Barthes

I attempt to write a good novel. Whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe.

- Elizabeth George

Don't ask to live in tranquil times. Literature doesn't grow there.

- Rita Mae Brown

The object of Literature is to instruct, to animate, or to amuse.

- George Henry Lewes

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Literature is air, and I'm suffocating in mediocrity.

- Armand Assante

Literature is the denunciation of the times in which one lives.

- Camilo Jose Cela

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

- Guillermo Cabrera Infante

What hadn't been realized in the literature until now is that merely to describe how severely something has been tested in the past itself embodies inductive assumptions, even as a statement about the past.

- Robert Nozick

Only the more rugged mortals should attempt to keep up with current literature.

- George Ade

All good Literature rests primarily on insight.

- George Henry Lewes

Underground literature only began in the '70s, when technical developments made it possible. Before that, we were involved in a game with the censors. That was our struggle.

- Ryszard Kapuscinski

Literature delivers tidings of the world within and the world without.

- George Henry Lewes

SF is the literature of the theoretically possible, and F is the literature of the impossible.

- Piers Anthony

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

- Virginia Woolf

Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.

- Marilyn Hacker