quotations about literature
In the nineteenth century one had to give all sorts of guarantees and lead an exemplary life in order to cleanse oneself in the eyes of the bourgeois of the sin of writing, for literature is, in essence, heresy. The situation has not changed except that it is now the Communists, that is, the qualified representatives of the proletariat, who as a matter of principle regard the writer as suspect.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
What Is Literature?: And Other Essays
My wife has a beastly habit of comparing poetry -- all literature in fact -- to the droppings of the goats among the rocks -- mere excreta that fertilises the ground it falls on.
D. H. LAWRENCE
letter to Edward Marsh, November 18, 1913
Even the choicest literature should be taken as the condiment, and not as the sustenance of life. It should be neither the warp nor the woof of existence, but only the flowery edging upon its borders.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
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
Truth is the first thing that present-day literature lacks. The writer has drowned himself in lies, he is too accustomed to speak prudently, with a careful look over his shoulder.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
The Day and the Age
Such a superiority do the pursuits of literature possess above every other occupation, that even he who attains but a mediocrity in them, merits the pre-eminence above those that excel the most in the common and vulgar professions.
DAVID HUME
The History of England
You can tell a man's taste in literature by his judgment in knowing what not to read.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Life itself today has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become displaced, fantastic, familiar-unfamiliar. This is why it is so logical for literature today to be drawn to the fantastic plot, or to an amalgam of reality and fantasy.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
The New Russian Prose
I don't think literature will be purged until its philosophic pretentiousness is extruded, and I shant live to see that purge, nor perhaps when it has happened will anything survive.
E. M. FORSTER
Commonplace Book
There never was a literary age whose dominant taste was not sickly; the success of excellent authors consists in making wholesome works agreeable to morbid tastes.
JOUBERT
attributed, Day's Collacon
Literature is the voice of the age and the state; the character, energy, and resources of the country are reflected and imaged forth in the conceptions of its great minds; they are organs of the time; they speak not their own language, they scarce think their own thoughts; but under an impulse like the prophetic enthusiasm of old, they must feel and utter the sentiments which society inspires.
EDWARD EVERETT
oration at Cambridge before the society of Phi Beta Kappa, Aug. 26, 1824
Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.
JOHN STEINBECK
Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Dec. 10, 1962
The advantage of literature over life is that its characters are clearly defined, and act consistently.
JEROME K. JEROME
"Reginald Blake, Financier and Cad"
If the purpose of literature is to illuminate human nature, the purpose of fantastic literature is to do that from a wider perspective. You can say different things about what it means to be human if you can contrast that to what it means to be a robot, or an alien, or an elf.
JO WALTON
interview, Literatura Fantastico, Nov. 22, 2012
Originality in literature is only a new coat of paint on an old house.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Literature, at least good literature, is science tempered with the blood of art. Like architecture or music.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Angel's Game
It is the glorious doom of literature that the evil perishes and the good remains. Even when the original author of some healthy and useful truth is forgotten, the truth survives, transplanted to works more calculated to purify it from error, and perpetuate it to our benefit.
EDWARD BULWER LYTTON
The Student: A Series of Papers
When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written.
GEORGE SAINTSBURY
A Last Vintage
There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature. They are like gigantic trees that we sometimes see on the banks of a stream; which, by their vast and deep roots, penetrating through the mere surface, and laying hold on the very foundations of the earth, preserve the soil around them from being swept away by the ever-flowing current, and hold up many a neighboring plant, and perhaps worthless weed, to perpetuity.
WASHINGTON IRVING
"The Mutabilities of Literature", The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon
I don't wish to be a slave any longer to the stringent exigencies of literature.
PHILIP ROTH
Le Monde, special issue, Jan. 2013