quotations about literature
There is such a thing as literary fashion, and prose and verse have been regulated by the same caprice that cuts our coats and cocks our hats.
ISAAC DISRAELI
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Curiosities of Literature
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Be not merely a man of letters! Let literature be an honorable augmentations to your arms, not constitute the coat or fill the escutcheon!
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
Biographia Literaria
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True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
"I Am Afraid", A Soviet Heretic
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Sanity -- that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
preface, Poems
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What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And -- though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports ... what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing.
V. S. NAIPAUL
Reading & Writing
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It is with literature as with law or empire -- an established name is an estate in tenure, or a throne in possession.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"Letter to Mr. B--"
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The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and, lastly, the solid cash.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
letter to Horatio Bridge, Mar. 15, 1851
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It is now only in letters I write what I feel: not in literature any more, and I seldom say it, because I keep trying to be amusing.
E. M. FORSTER
Commonplace Book
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Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1930
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In general it will perhaps be found that persons devoted to mere literature commonly become devoted to mere idleness. They wish to produce a great work, but they find they cannot. Having relinquished everything to devote themselves to this, they conclude on trial that this is impossible. They wish to write, but nothing occurs to them. Therefore they write nothing, and they do nothing. As has been said, they have nothing to do. Their life has no events, unless they are very poor. With any decent means of subsistence, they have nothing to rouse them from an indolent and musing dream. A merchant must meet his bills, or he is civilly dead and uncivilly remembered. But a student may know nothing of time and be too lazy to wind up his watch.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
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Literary revolution and revolutionary literature did not create a beautiful new world but instead divested literature of its basic nature, promoted violence, and, by resorting to linguistic violence, made a battlefield of this domain of spiritual freedom.
GAO XINGJIAN
"Literature as Testimony: The Search for Truth", Witness Literature: Proceedings of the Nobel Centennial Symposium
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I realized the amazing power of literature and of the human imagination generally: to make the dead live and to stop the living from dying.
IVAN KLIMA
Love and Garbage
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Literature ... as a field for glory, is an arena where a tomb may be more easily found than laurels; as a means of support it is the very chance of chances.
HENRY GILES
Lectures and Essays
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The literary world is fueled by pretension. People buy books because they love literature. But they also buy books because they like to seem clever and educated. They like to waltz around town with New Yorker tote bags, go to literary festivals and leave Penguin Classics casually lying around the house for visitors to see.
JAMES MARRIOTT
"The novel is in deep trouble--and only pretension can save it", The Times, August 31, 2018
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For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.
DORIS LESSING
A Proper Marriage
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The finer literature, indeed, is characterized by a certain suffusion of the feminine flavor, the finer, the more ideal, thought plumed with sentiment; even science loves to spring from its feet, philosophy affect the clouds to inspire and edify.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
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The literary gift is a mere accident--is as often bestowed on idiots who have nothing to say worth hearing as it is denied to strenuous sages.
MAX BEERBOHM
Letters of Max Beerbohm, 1892-1956
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Literary history is the great morgue where all seek the dead ones whom they love, or to whom they are related.
HEINRICH HEINE
Scintillations from the Prose Works of Heinrich Heine
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If I might control the literature of the household, I would guarantee the well-being of Church and State.
FRANCIS BACON
attributed, Forty Thousand Quotations, Prose and Poetical
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Every few seconds a new book sees the light of day. Most of them will just be a part of the hum that makes us hard of hearing. Even the book is becoming an instrument of forgetting. A truly literary work comes into being as its creator's cry of protest against the forgetting that looms over him, over his predecessors and his contemporaries alike, and over his time, and the language he speaks. A literary work is something that defies death.
IVAN KLIMA
speech at conference in Lahti, Finland, 1990
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