Quotes About Literature

Mr. Upward italicises "at the present time" because he realises that you cannot, for instance, dismiss Hamlet on the ground that Shakespeare was not a Marxist.

Literature is an attempt to influence one's contemporaries through the recording of experience.

At any rate that year of reading novels was the only real education, in the sense of book–learning, that I've ever had. It did certain things to my mind. It gave me an attitude, a kind of questioning attitude, which I probably wouldn't have had if I'd gone through life in a normal sensible way.

Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble.

Lo siniestro de la censura literaria en Inglaterra es que en su mayor parte es voluntaria. Las ideas impopulares pueden silenciarse, y los hechos inconvenientes mantenerse en la oscuridad, sin necesidad de prohibición oficial.

He would read King Lear and forget this filthy century.

Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody.

what is important for my purpose is that it was during the "anti-Fascist" phase that the younger English writers gravitated towards Communism. The

There is no such thing as a genuinely non-political literature, and least of all in an age like our own, when fears, hatreds, and loyalties of a directly political kind are near the surface of everyone's consciousness.

Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and æsthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.

a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money.

Kuigi ma pidin otsima ja ka otsisin õigeid sõnu, paistsin ma tegevat neid kirjanduslikke pingutusi peaaegu vastu tahtmist, mingi välise sunni ajel.

George Orwell is the best author -Jolie

Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking' in meaning.2 Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader.

En iyi kitaplar, bize bildiklerimizi söyleyenlerdir.

Kuid on ka andekate, isemeelsete inimeste vähemus, kelle määranguks on omaenda elu lõpuni elada, ja kirjanikud kuuluvad sellesse klassi.

I loved [fairy stories] so, and my mother weighed down by grief had given up telling me them. At Nohant I found Mmes. d'Ardony's and Perrault's tales in old editions which became my chief joy for five or six years ... I've never read them since, but I could tell each tale straight through, and I don't think anything in all one's intellecutal life can be compared to these delights of imagination.

You must write for all those who are thirsty to read and who can enjoy a good reading.

For her, finally, the literary art is an instrument of social salvation—it is her means of touching the world with her ideals, her love, her aspiration; for him the literary art is the avenue of escape from the meaningless chaos of existence—it is his subtly critical condemnation of the world.

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.

The bible is literature, not dogma.

A novel is just a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.

Russian short story master Isaac Babel put it, "no iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.

And that, by extrapolation, every person in the world has his or her inner orchestra, and the instruments present in their orchestras are, roughly speaking, the same as the ones in ours. And this is why literature works.