Quotes About Literature

How many writers in history have ever been as famous as Stephen King? He casts an awfully long shadow.

Historical novels, in particular, allow us to relive the past without the neatness of history, and with all the complexity of the present.

Historians of literature like to regard a century as a series of ten faces, each grimacing in a different way.

History without politics descends to mere Literature.

My favorite literature to read is fairly dry history. I like the framework, and my imagination can do the rest.

To study history is to study literature.

Politics are vulgar when they are not liberalised by history, and history fades into mere literature when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics.

Fiction is ideally suited to re-creating the important emotional aspects of history.

When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.

Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where/ Latin ashes and the dust of Greece/ mingled with novels, history, and verse/ in one dark Babel. I was folio-high/ when I first heard the voices.

Sometimes a book is better than it ever had a right to be because of the history the reader brings to the reading and because of the methods educators use to bring a particular story alive.

In a country like France, so ancient, their history is full of outstanding people, so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert?

If you are a man of learning, read something classic, a history of the human struggle and don't settle for mediocre verse.

Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral.

Never stop reading. History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.

I learned more about history and literature in the used bookstores in DC than in college libraries.

Between history and the novel stands biography, their unwanted offspring, which has brought a great embarrassment to them both.

I think I was a good student, because I jumped over a school. My main interest was basically history and literature. Sports were basically basketball and swimming at a pool. I was so happy.

Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost what subject he may.

There have always been readers throughout history who have been drawn to villains.

I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

Learning from books is so empowering - whether it be from history, a novel or a poem. When you come away from reading having learned something, you yourself are bigger.

The best and only true history we have. Everyone interested in creative writing should know this book.