4,370 Quotes About Literature

If literature is to survive, to gain back some of the power it has ceded to terrorists and newsmakers of all descriptions, it must become dangerous.

Oft times I write with my own blood in pain,a quick release of freedom to express well,the woes of past and present by views train;while my fancies unbar from my soul’s hall.

I read a sentence or two, wait for him to come up with his usual barrage of questions, answer them, then read another sentence or two. Classics read well this way. They must be written this way. Sometimes we have spent a whole evening reading and talking and discovered we have only covered two or three pages. It's a form of reading done a century ago.. when Chautauquas were popular. In less you've tried it you can't imagine how pleasant it is to do it this way.

To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.

All in your thoughts is how you create, prophecy of your future in the present is to stimulate and manipulate what's to come at a later date. Give attention as I put this food for thought on a line and hook like it's spiritual bait.

He's amused at himself, getting wrapped up in the drama of novels like that. It feels intellectually unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another. But there it is: literature moves him.

Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.

The birth of a true poet is neither an insignificant event nor an easy delivery. Complications generally begin long before the fated soul carries its dubious light into whatever womb has been kind enough to volunteer the intricate machinery of its blood and prayers and muscles for a gestation period much longer than nine months or even nine years.

Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.