Literature Quotes - Page 128

I think literature is somehow both a fantasy and a reality we should all get back to.

The more we get away from believing and studying literature, the worst we become, the more we lose our soul.

I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels... a Library of Congress worth of awful literature.

I don't read novels that are looking to convince me of anything. I believe that literature needs to be a machine of illusions.

Leisure without literature is death, or rather the burial of a living man -Otium sine litteris mors est et hominis vivi sepultura

Life without literary studies is death.

As a student in England, I studied French and English literature. I read L'Etranger and the rhythm of the novel felt familiar to me - very African.

If England has any dignity left in the way of literature, she will forget for ever the pitiful antics of English Literature's performing flea.

There's a wealth of literature out there which, hopefully, will be, you know, exploded in the future, and I personally find it very rewarding to be involved with classic storytelling, and sort of legendary characters.

We have a name for your disease. We call it a hyper-aesthetic one. You have been encouraged to over-indulge yourself in literature; and have inflamed your organs of fancy.

Never pursue literature as a trade.

The spirit of poetry, like all other living powers, must of necessity circumscribe itself by rules, were it only to unite power with beauty.

Be not merely a man of letters! Let literature be an honorable augmentations to your arms, not constitute the coat or fill the escutcheon!

With no other privilege than that of sympathy and sincere good wishes, I would address an affectionate exhortation to the youthful literati, grounded on my own experience. It will be but short; for the beginning, middle, and end converge to one charge: NEVER PURSUE LITERATURE AS A TRADE.

Of all the many and (thanks to a free press) the ever-multiplying blessings attendant upon the "glorious constitution" of literature, not the least precious and profitable to a modern cultivator of systems and syllables, in pamphlets, magazines, and folios, is the right of Quotation.

I like books. I've always got a literature book going. I'd be in there reading, in my off time.

I respect Millar, sir: he has raised the price of literature.

Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.

The richest author that ever grazed the common of literature.

I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific bigwigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.

The situation is that of him who is helpless, cannot act, in the event cannot paint, since he is obliged to paint. The act is of him who, helpless, unable to act, acts, in the event paints, since he is obliged to paint.

I have nothing but wastes and wilds of self-translation before me for many miserable months to come.

I am especially indebted to a 10th grade English teacher who encouraged me to read great works of literature.

In literature and in life we ultimately pursue, not conclusions, but beginnings.

Magic realism - somebody used that phrase the other day that is familiar with South American literature. That rang a bell. It resonates with me.