Quotes About Literature

Every 10 years you're a different person, and the really great books evolve with you as you get older. They're full of new rewards.

A great literature is thus chiefly the product of doubting and inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

Books make great gifts because you don't have to plug them in.

There is no great writing, only great rewriting.

Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.

Great literature, if we read it well, opens us up to the world and makes us more sensitive to it, as if we acquired eyes that could see through things and ears that could hear smaller sounds.

I'm sure there are writers who are great businessmen, but I never met any.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.

At last, in 1611, was made, under the auspices of King James, the famous King James version; and this is the great literary monument of the English language.

When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.

If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference.

Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that?

Literature bores me, especially great literature

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

My father was a frustrated writer. I think he wanted to write the great American novel.

And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature.

I've always wondered why there isn't a great French novel about the German occupation. The nouveau roman authors weren't interested in telling that sort of thing.

Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors.

For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Books make great gifts because they can unveil hidden secrets.

Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.

Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.