Quotes About Literature

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.

La gran literatura no es más que el lenguaje cargado de sentido hasta el grado máximo que sea posible.

Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportioned to their ability AS WRITERS. This is their main use. All other uses are relative, and temporary, and can be estimated only in relation to the views of a particular estimator.

The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.

I resolved that at 30 I would know more about poetry than any man living, that I would know what was accounted poetry everywhere, what part of poetry was "indestructible," what part could not be lost by translation and—scarcely less important—what effects were obtainable in one language only and were utterly incapable of being translated.

There is one quality which unites all great and perdurable writers, you don't NEED schools and colleges to keep 'em alive. Put them out of the curriculum, lay them in the dust of libraries, and once in every 80 often a chance reader, unsubsidized and unbribed, will dig them up again, put them in the light again, without asking favours.

Another point miscomprehended by people who are clumsy at languages is that one does not need to learn a whole language in order to understand some one or some dozen poems. It is often enough to understand throroughly the poem, and every one of the few dozen of few hundred words that compose it.

And they want to know what we talked about? "de litteris et de armis, praestantibusque ingeniis", Both of ancient times and our own; books, arms, And of men of unusual genius.

I would like to accept C. H.'s book But it would make my own seem so out of date. Heaven will protect The lay reader.

The book should be a ball of light in one's hand. Guide to Kulchur.

You are a fool to read classics because you are told to and not because you like them.

Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.

Literature is news that stays news.

There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight

It is the mark of a truly educated man to know what not to read.

There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good.

La lectura, para los deconstructivos, es una tarea infinita y no se entiene que tengan necesidad de más de un libro

La lectura, para los deconstructivos, es una tarea infinita y no se entiene que tengan necesidad de más de un libro. (Diccionario de las artes)

There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people, if he's any good.