Quotes About Literature

Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.

The written word is the only anchor we have in life. How extraordinary would it be if we had even three or four paragraphs written honestly about their lives by our ancestors?

Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.

Books have always helped me make sense of things. With any life experience, you can find someone who has documented it in a poetic way.

You'll be a poorer person all your life if you don't know some of the great stories and great poems.

I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else's.

I find that in a novel I can get more of life, perhaps not such intense life, but certainly more of life than in poetry.

Why, after all, should readers never be harrowed? Surely there is enough happiness in life without having to go to books for it.

The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self.

Jane Austen: Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver. Something vital is lacking; namely, life.

I hated myself and the world because I had failed to face and accept the limitations of my self and of life. In literature this refusal is called romanticism; in psychology, neurosis.

Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.

Poets are always the advance guard of literature; the advance guard of life. It is for this reason that their recognition comes so slowly.

It appears these days I don't have much of a life because my nose is often stuck in a book. But I discovered that reading builds a life inside the mind.

Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.

As I continued through Cicero's pages, I found much more material celebrating my way of life.

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

Some characters become your friends for life. That's how it was for me with Betsy-Tacy.

Reading time is precious. Don't waste it. Reading bad books, or books that are wrong for a certain time in your life, can dangerously turn you off the activity altogether.

One problem with the work of the New Critics was that their close readings, no matter how brilliant, could not deliver all they seemed to promise.

I read all of those books I always wanted to read, or reread... And I feel full. Until I finish a book. Then I feel a certain desperation to start a new one. To have company.

Reviewing a book written by someone you're living with and sleeping with is, needless to say, wrong.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said Lippmann's pieces were like flypaper: "If I touch it, I am stuck till I finish it.