LITERATURE QUOTES
quotations about literature
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One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.
JORGE LUIS BORGES, "Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw," Other Inquisitions
To subvert is not the aim of literature, its value lies in discovering and revealing what is rarely known, little known, thought to be known but in fact not very well known of the truth of the human world. It would seem that truth is the unassailable and most basic quality of literature.
GAO XINGJIAN, Nobel Lecture, 2000
Originality in literature is only a new coat of paint on an old house.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
All literature is but a word--a thought--a maxim amplified.
Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, speech, Feb. 6, 1990
I hate brandy ... it stinks of modern literature.
An interchange of literature is the conversation of nations.
I realised 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
We never reflect whether the story we read be truth or fiction. If the painting be lively, and a tolerable picture of nature, we are thrown into a reverie, from which if we awaken it is the fault of the writer. I appeal to every reader of feeling and sentiment whether the fictitious murder of Duncan by Macbeth in Shakespeare does not excite in him as great a horror of villainy as the real one of Henry IV by Ravaillac as related by Davila? And whether the fidelity of Nelson and generosity of Blandford in Marmontel do not dilate his breast and elevate his sentiments as much as any similar incident which real history can furnish? Does he not, in fact, feel himself a better man while reading them, and privately covenant to copy the fair example?
THOMAS JEFFERSON, letter to Robert Skipwith, Aug. 3, 1771
We think literature is immortal, but even that decays and ultimately turns to dust.
The advantage of literature over life is that its characters are clearly defined, and act consistently.
JEROME K. JEROME, "Reginald Blake, Financier and Cad"
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.
I expected more from literature than from real, naked life.
GUNTER GRASS, The Tin Drum
Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do -- it can make us identify with situations and people far away. If it does that, it's a miracle.
CHINUA ACHEBE, The Altantic Online, Aug. 2, 2000
Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely, eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms, and little wildflowers.
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
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
There is a form of literature that is a deed, and a form that is only talk, and the latter passes away like a conversation.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
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
The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said.
JORGE LUIS BORGES, The Paris Review, winter-spring 1967
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
The world must be all f***ed up when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, One Hundred Years of Solitude
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