Quotes About Literature

One handles truths like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a giant deception, treachery. All writers have concealed more than they revealed.

Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.

Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.

Novelisation doesn't imply the truth. Readers are sophisticated enough to know that.

Fiction is the microscope of truth.

To me the truth comes first and then the literature. We in China are dealing with a dictatorial system and we writers have to take a stance on it.

There's no division on my bookshelf between fiction and nonfiction. As far as I'm concerned, fiction is about the truth.

Everything I write has a precedent in truth.

In communist Russia, their major organ was Pravda, which means "truth." The Russians knew how to read between the lines. They didn't take their literature literally.

Personal experience is the basis of all real literature.

Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.

The reason we constantly discover new truth in Shakespeare is that his complete understanding of the particular includes the universal.

...I have come to make distinctions between what I call the academy and literature, the moral equivalents of church and God. The academy may lie, but literature tries to tell the truth.

Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?" "So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober.

I am actuated by an ambition which I believe to be an honourable one — the ambition of serving the great cause of truth, while endeavouring to forward the literature of the country.

Whether every story that's there [in the Bible] is a historic truth ... Again, I'm not concerned.

All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.

The most appealing part is the feeling of learning something true - the pleasure of a truth. For me, that's mostly found in philosophical literature at the moment.

Literature is subservient to nothing but truth.

I do think that calling a book nonfiction affirms a kind of responsibility to an attempt at truth.

Exaggerated history is poetry, and truth referred to a new standard.

And the truth is that if a writer is successful, you gain readers. It benefits all the writers. It's important for all the writers that as many of us as possible be successful.

I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.

My poems getting published in Russia doesn't make me feel in any fashion, to tell you the truth. I'm not trying to be coy, but it doesn't tickle my ego.