Literature Quotes

Never pursue literature as a trade.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.

Rachel Louise Carson

In science, read, by preference the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Edward George Earl Bulwer Lytton

There are people whom even childrens literature would corrupt. They read with particular enjoyment the piquant passages in the Psalter and in the Wisdom of Solomon.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Despite your best efforts, you could not invent a better police force for literature than criticism and the authors own conscience.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Journalism may not dare too much. It can be gently humorous and ironic, very lightly touched by idiosyncrasy, but it must not repel readers by digging too deeply. This is especially true of its approach to language: the conventions are not questioned. The questioning of linguistic conventions is one of the main duties of what we call literature.

Anthony Burgess

Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.

John Cheever

Quantum fiction is literature that embodies the new physical or quantum universe.

Vanna Bonta

Any literature, when it arrives at being good literature, transcends genre.

Vanna Bonta

If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands, they must be made brighter in our own. If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.

Carson Mccullers

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows on the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time.

Barbara W. Tuchman

The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.

Milton Friedman

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

Steven Pinker

Lovers of literature will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism.

Josef Skvorecky