4,370 Quotes About Literature

The novelist must discover the potential, the gold mine, of man’s soul, must extract the gold and then fashion as magnificent a crown as his ability and vision permit.

It feels intellectually unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another. But there it is: literature moves him.

El mundo se creó para los muertos. Piensa en todos los muertos que hay —dijo, y luego, como si hubiera concebido la respuesta a todas las insolencias, añadió—: ¡Los muertos son un millón de veces más que los vivos y el tiempo que los muertos pasan muertos es un millón de veces más que el tiempo que los vivos pasan vivos!

It had never occurred to him until then that literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people.

Gombrowicz, Nabokov, Svevo, Schnitzler, Canetti. How is it that the greatest are, in their varying degrees, violently hostile to psychoanalysis? And, ultimately, towards the end of his life, Freud himself ?

The Holy Book is a holy literature.

Politics is the great generalizer and literature the great particularizer, and not only are they in an inverse relationship to each other---they are in an antagonistic relationship.

Eternity is a glorious word, but eternity is ice.

The novel, I believe, allows, encourages ways to experience the public – in time, with affect, in a communal space, with other people (characters), and in language that insists on individual participation. It also tries to illuminate and recover the relationship between literature and public life.