Quotes about Literature

Let us now celebrate the literary allusion.
Let us now celebrate the trope and willful
enjambment. Let us now celebrate
the assonance and alliteration of all of it.
Let us now celebrate the sound of our own voices.

Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies for Nabisco.

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

Literature tells very little to those who understand it.

"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly. ..."

Literature, at its best, and despite the recent attempts of critics, can never be murdered and dissected, as it’s an immortal yet organic thing, drawing on the richness and complexity of Experience yet somehow managing to transcend its mundane origins like an alchemist transmuting base metals.

Let’s begin a new literary movement. I don’t care what we call it. Let’s start writing novels for people who don't like novels. Because these days who can blame them? You can please all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can’t please all the people all the time. So let’s at least please ourselves.

Theory does everything in its power to remove the living soul of literature, tear its heart out, make of the study of Art a hard-edged Science. Never mind that Art is as far removed from measurement as Science is from love. As writers confronting theory, it’s incumbent on us not to let our prose dry up in that desert, but to allow it to become a desert rose, our prose, flourishing in the heat and sands of what passes for knowledge.

All literature, all philosophical treatises, all the voices of antiquity are full of examples for imitation, which would all lie unseen in darkness without the light of literature.
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Early in my research, that strange phenomenon which Carl Jung called synchronicity brought me in touch with the single most amazing Baconian artifact I could have imagined. Most readers are familiar with such surprising events. Suddenly out of nowhere, just at the right time and the right place, some essential object or information will appear, as though a genie had been at work behind the scenes.

For me this surprise came in the shape of a strange wooden contraption known as a cipher wheel. On the printed pages affixed to it, in a most ingenious code is recorded the true story of Francis Bacon-an account actually and incredibly written by him in his own words. It is a story that changes the current concept of English history. No longer was guesswork necessary. Now the task was to fit the details of Bacon's life, as the cipher gives it, into accepted records of history.

The Shakespeare Code is my attempt to do just that and to explain what the cipher wheel is and why Bacon felt the need to create the ciphers. It is a poignant and tragic tale-but one that ends on an unexpected note of triumph. It is a story that is crying out to be told.

For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.

The one thing is fiction in a novel and the other thing is reality. With fiction you don't make a fuss - you can 'beat it' and there's never enough. At least in my opinion - cause there are people, who complain about style intensity in literature: they prefer cereals with milk than abyssinian bitches roasted alive on bringhausers and watered with ya-yoo juice.

"Censors are necessary, increasingly necessary, if America is to avoid having a vital literature."

A responsibility of literature is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.

Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.

I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail. WILLIAM FAULKNER, address upon receiving the Nobel Prize for literature, Stockholm, Sweden, December 10, 1950. - Faulkner, Essays, Speeches & Public Letters, p. 120 (1951). This text is from Faulkner's original typescript; it was slightly revised from that which he delivered in Stockholm, and which was published in American newspapers at the time (p. 121).

Take the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or beauty or form, we are borrowers.

That complete statement which is literature.

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

"In Western languages the names of the four seasons became complete only a few centuries ago. Words for winter and summer appear quite early but in English "spring" came to be used as the name of the season as late as the sixteenth century, and in German 'fruhjahr', "spring" appeared about the same time. Similarly, in India "hemanta(winter) and vasanta(spring)" appear in Sanskrit literature very early, while other seasonal terms come much later."

I doubt if God's answer to a prayer is influenced by its literary quality.

Quite a number of people also describe the German classical author, Shakespeare as belonging to the English literature, because - quite accidentally born at Stratford-on-Avon, he was forced by the authorities of that country to write in English.

We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.

We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.

The idea that all the people locked up in mental hospitals are sane while all the people walking about are mad is merely a literary cliche, put about by people who should be locked up. I assure you there is not much in it. Taken as a whole, the sane are out there the sick are in here. For example you are in here because you have delusions that sane people are put in mental hospitals.

The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul.

To take Macaulay out of literature and society and put him in the House of Commons, is like taking the chief physician out of London during a pestilence.

We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal.

A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.