Quotations
Quotes:
The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.
View quotes by Isaac Singer
The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.
View quotes by Lionel Trilling
American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World.
View quotes by Christopher Dawson
If literature isn't worth everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.
View quotes by Jean Paul Sartre
Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life is the other way round
View quotes by David Lodge
When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen
View quotes by Samuel Lover
Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.
View quotes by Anita Brookner
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
View quotes by Ezra Pound
What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books
View quotes by A S Byatt
One thinks of French philosophy that it aspires to the condition of literature or the condition of art, and that English and American philosophy aspires to the condition of science. French philosophy, one thinks of as picking up an idea and running with it, posibility into a nearby brick wall or over a local cliff, or something like that.
View quotes by Ted Honderich
Journalism is literature in a hurry.
View quotes by Matthew Arnold
For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.
View quotes by Matthew Arnold
Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.
View quotes by J G Ballard
The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.
View quotes by Daniel Boorstin
Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
View quotes by Samuel Butler
A louse in the locks of literature.
View quotes by Alfred Lord Tennyson
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
View quotes by Barbara Tuchman
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.
View quotes by Sir Walter Scott
Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: 'You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.'
View quotes by Cesare Pavese
Literature is news that stays news.
View quotes by Ezra Pound
