Quotes About Literature

He scribbled a lot of words for a dying man.

T]he three greatest works are those of Homer , Dante and Shakespeare . These are closely followed by the works of Virgil and Milton .

TEN GREATEST ENGLISH POETS Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning. TEN GREATEST ENGLISH ESSAYISTS Bacon, Addison, Steele, Macaulay, Lamb, Jeffrey, De Quincey, Carlyle, Thackeray and Matthew Arnold.

In employing the long sentence the inexperienced writer should not strain after the heavy, ponderous type. Johnson and Carlyle used such a type, but remember, an ordinary mortal cannot wield the sledge hammer of a giant. Johnson and Carlyle were intellectual giants and few can hope to stand on the same literary pedestal.

Many moons ago dictionaries of quotations may have been less needed than they are today. In those good/bad old days, people walked around with entire poems and all the Shakespearean soliloquies in their heads....

Someone — Cyril Connolly? Ezra Pound? — once said that anything that can be read twice is literature; I would say that anything that bears saying twice is quotable.

A writer can get into a vast deal of trouble through misquotation. If you ever want to receive lots of mail, I recommend you get a Shakespeare quote wrong in a magazine or newspaper."

Yet, for the person of literary education, all ideas, as Orwell felt ought to be the case with all saints, are guilty until proven innocent.

The best way to ensure that your writing is as good as you can make it is simply to consult your imagination and judgment as you write and take note of whether you are using an expression that has found its way into the stream simply because it's always there, swirling lifelessly in an eddy, where it was recently deposited by some other writer you have read.

Horace, fecundi calices quem non fecere disertum?" He paused, and then translated. "Whom have flowing cups not made eloquent?

If it was his mother who had given birth to him in the flesh, it was Pushkin who had given birth to him in the world of the spirit.

Mikhailovsky

Pouchkine était son père spirituel. Pouchkine domina la vie littéraire de Dostoïevski du début à la fin. C'est pour lui, l'idole littéraire de sa jeunesse, que le romancier prit pour la dernière fois la parole en public. En 1880, à l'occasion de l'inauguration du monument Pouchkine, Dostoïevski prononça un discours qui eut un immense retentissement dans toute la Russie.

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

it is unfair to characterize the work of postmodernists as "bad writing," despite the fact that a lot of it is actually bad writing.

He knew everything there was to know about literature, except how to enjoy it

Did you ever hear anyone say, "That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me?"

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.

To me the art of the Counter Reformation was a pure joy and I loved the churches of Bernini and Borromini no less than the ancient basilicas. And this in turn led me to the literature of the Counter Reformation, and I came to know St Theresa and St John of the Cross, compared to whom even the greatest of non-Catholic religious writers seem pale and unreal.19

There is, however, one other figurative representative of humanity in which we fail to recognize our own scornful and pitiful selves at our peril. That pathetic figure reflecting the readers back to themselves very uncomfortably is Gollum. Seldom or perhaps never in the field of human literature has the human soul in a state of addiction to sin been portrayed with such psychological realism and spiritual brilliance.

A lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written about.

Many of us served in the war, many died. We have written for Germany, we have died for Germany. We have spilled our blood for Germany in two ways: the blood that runs in our veins, and the blood with which we write. We have sung Germany, the real Germany! And that is why today we are being burned by Germany!

Literature was formerly an art and finance a trade: today it is the reverse.

READ!READ!READ! Till there are no books left in the world to read!