Quotes About Literature

I do not know a better cure for mental illness than a book.

Cocaine did him in, or morphine—did him in, they say, after he fell from an aeroplane somewhere in the marshes around Novgorod.

And have you ever run across a bright and enlivening sun in Gogol—a man from Ukraine?

Gorky is a forerunner—the most powerful in our time.

If the world could write itself, it would write like Tolstoy.

No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.

Consider this: Could it be true that, in all Russian literature, there isn't a single clear and joyous depiction of the sun?

ISAAC BABEL was a short-story writer, playwright, literary translator and journalist.

He was murdered in Stalin's purges in 1940, at the age of 45.

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.

It seems that the analysis of character is the highest human entertainment. And literature does it, unlike gossip, without mentioning real names.

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual -- when it begins to ignore the passions, the motions -- it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.

What do these children do without storybooks?" Naftali asked. And Reb Zebulun replied: "They have to make do. Storybooks aren't bread. You can live without them." I couldn't live without them." Naftali said.

I don't study literature, I read it for enjoyment

Time the great destroyer of other men's happiness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its possessor.

Proverbs were bright shafts in the Greek and Latin quivers...

The ancients, who in these matters were not perhaps such blockheads as some may conceive, considered poetical quotation as one of the requisite ornaments of oratory.

A well-read writer, with good taste, is one who has the command of the wit of other men; he searches where knowledge is to be found; and though he may not himself excel in invention, his ingenuity may compose one of those agreeable books, the deliciæ of literature, that will out-last the fading meteors of his day.

The Central Committee will cut off its relations with [the undisciplined organization] and it will thereby cut off that organization from the entire world of revolution. The Central Committee will stop the flow of literature and of wherewithal to that organization. It will send into the field … its own detachment, and, having endowed it with the necessary resources, the Central Committee will proclaim that this detachment is the local committee.

The greatest tribute one can give to a writer is that it is simply enough to read him.

Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever put poetry in my way.

The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.

La fede assoluta in soluzioni razionali e la proliferazione della letteratura utopistica sono due aspetti di stadi consimili dello sviluppo culturale, nell'Atene classica come nel Rinascimento italiano, nel settecento francese come nei due secoli successivi, e non meno oggi che nel passato recente o remoto.

One of the joys of reading is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind.