Quotations and Poems

» “Only the more rugged mortals should attempt to keep up with current literature.”
– George Ade

»  ”Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.”
– Nelson Algren

»  ”The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation.”
– Aharon Appelfeld

»  ”If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor.”
– W. H. Auden

»  ”Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.”
– Gaston Bachelard

»  ”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

»  ”In the present age, alas! our pens are ravished by unlettered authors and unmannered critics, that make a havoc rather than a building, a wilderness rather than a garden. But, a lack! what boots it to drop tears upon the preterit?”
– Aubrey Beardsley

»  ”Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet, your works will contain them without your knowledge — they will be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely.”
– Vissarion Belinsky

»  ”The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.”
– Hugh Blair

»  ”Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. 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

»  ”A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug.”
– George Borrow

»  ”All literature is political.”
– LeVar Burton

»  ”English literature is a kind of training in social ethics. English trains you to handle a body of information in a way that is conducive to action.”
– Marilyn Butler

»  ”The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.”
– Italo Calvino

»  ”When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign — a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don’t want to hear the word mentioned.”
– Italo Calvino

»  ”All literature is gossip.”
– Truman Capote

»  ”There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.”
– Thomas Carlyle

»  ”When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball.”
– Raymond Chandler

»  ”Speak of the moderns without contempt, and of the ancients without idolatry.”
– Lord Chesterfield

»  ”The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.”
– Jean Cocteau

»  ”One learns little more about a man from his feats of literary memory than from the feats of his alimentary canal.”
– Frank Moore Colby

»  ”Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise above its source, so it is true that a national literature cannot rise above the moral level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its inspiration.”
– James Connolly

»  ”The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.”
– Elizabeth Drew

»  ”Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur ”Thou still unravished bride of quietness,” then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.”
– Terry Eagleton

»  ”When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behavior by his attitude towards the result of the behavior arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way.”
– T. S. Eliot

»  ”People do not deserve to have good writings; they are so pleased with the bad.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

»  ”If you look at history you’ll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict.”
– Desiderius Erasmus

»  ”The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn’t have needed anyone since.”
– William Faulkner

»  ”To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.”
– Ernst Fischer

»  ”Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst.”
– Ford Madox Ford

»  ”In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.”
– Northrop Frye

»  ”Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.”
– Andre Gide

»  ”Literature, as a field of glory, is an arena where a tomb may be more easily found than laurels; and as a means of support, it is the chance of chances.”
– Henry Giles

»  ”The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency.”
– Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

»  ”One of the proud joys of the man of letters –if that man of letters is an artist is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world’s memory.”
– Edmond and Jules De Goncourt

»  ”It is the story-teller’s task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.”
– Graham Greene

»  ”A people’s literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.”
– Edith Hamilton

»  ”A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate”
– Christopher Hampton

»  ”I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.”
– Vaclav Havel

»  ”The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.”
– Vaclav Havel

»  ”It is a good lesson –though it may often be a hard one –for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world’s dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of all significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.”
– Nathaniel Hawthorne

»  ”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

»  ”All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”
– Ernest Hemingway

»  ”There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.”
– Ernest Hemingway

»  ”The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.”
– Ernest Hemingway

»  ”Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later. A man can be a Fascist or a Communist and if his outfit gets in he can get to be an ambassador or have a million copies of his books printed by the Government or any of the other rewards the boys dream about.”
– Ernest Hemingway

»  ”All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it. Many of the so-called politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently . Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness.”
– Ernest Hemingway

»  ”How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.”
– Ernest Hemingway

»  ”The self-styled intellectual who is impotent with pen and ink hungers to write history with sword and blood.”
– Eric Hoffer

»  ”Literature flourishes best when it is half trade and half an art.”
– Dean William R. Inge

»  ”It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”
– Henry James

»  ”Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.”
– P. D. James

»  ”The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper — whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.”
– Sarah Orne Jewett

»  ”Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.”
– Helen Keller

»  ”In the electronic age, books, words and reading are not likely to remain sufficiently authoritative and central to knowledge to justify literature.”
– Alvin Kernan

»  ”For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?”
– Milan Kundera

»  ”The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programs; or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold.”
– Milan Kundera

»  ”Despair, feeding, as it always does, on phantasmagoria, is imperturbably leading literature to the rejection, en masse, of all divine and social laws, towards practical and theoretical evil.”
– Isidore Ducasse, Comte De Lautreamont

»  ”Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!”
– D. H. Lawrence

»  ”Literature must become party literature. Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat.”
– Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

»  ”Literature is analysis after the event.”
– Doris Lessing

»  ”Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.”
– Sinclair Lewis

»  ”A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.”
– Georg C. Lichtenberg

»  ”With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.”
– Georg C. Lichtenberg

»  ”There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.”
– Mario Vargas Llosa

»  ”The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who hands over to the words.”
– Stephane Mallarme

»  ”Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.”
– Paul De Man

»  ”Literature… is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most reliable of terms in which man names and transforms himself.”
– Paul De Man

»  ”In literature, as in love, we are astonished at the choice made by other people.”
– Andre Maurois

»  ”It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important.”
– Ian Mcewan

»  ”For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.”
– Herman Melville

»  ”That is a very good question. I don’t know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?”
– Arthur Miller

»  ”What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.”
– Henry Miller

»  ”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

»  ”A literary movement consists of five or six people who live in the same town and hate each other cordially.”
– George Moore

»  ”Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions.”
– John Morley

»  ”Learning why one great book is just like every other great book is the key to understanding literature”
– John Moschitta

»  ”Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.”
– Iris Murdoch

»  ”I am not a literary man. I am a man of science, and I am interested in that branch of Anthropology which deals with the history of human speech.”
– Jim Murray

»  ”There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however na