Literature Quotes

A great literature is chiefly the product of inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.

H L Mencken

The difference between journalism and literature is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

Oscar Wilde

Literature is news that stays news.

Ezra Pound

Literature is the question minus the answer.

Roland Barthes

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

Ezra Pound

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

C.S. Lewis

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.

Salman Rushdie

Literature is the immortality of speech

August Wilhelm von Schlegel

Bad literature is a form of treason.

Joseph Brodsky

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

Nelson Algren

Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honours or of wealth.

Isaac D'Israeli

Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions.

John Morley

To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.

Ernst Fischer

When an Englishman has professed his belief in the supremacy of Shakespeare amongst all poets, he feels himself excused from the general study of literature. He also feels himself excused from the particular study of Shakespeare.

Aubrey Vincent Beardsley

Plot involves fragmentary reality, and it might involve composite reality. Fragmentary reality is the view of the individual. Composite reality is the community or state view. Fragmentary reality is always set against composite reality. Virginia Woolf did this by creating fragmentary monologues and for a while this was all the rage in literature. She was a genius. In the hands of the merely talented it came off like gibberish.

Rita Mae Brown
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