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Literature Quotes

What is literature? It is text that requires, firstly, immense patience and understanding to write and secondly, to read! To write a piece of work that is considered as literature, you must either be super dedicated to the cause or a genius! Acquainting yourself with words is probably one of the first steps to getting a great piece of work written. The main task lies in researching and verifying details. Literature can be both creative or technical but in both the cases, imagination plays quite an important role. The following section might just incite your imagination!

Val Kilmer

Mark Twain created a new type of literature and not a lot of people can say that. Not a lot of people can say they're absolutely original and completely self-made.

Ernest Hemingway

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

Virginia Woolf

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Charles Kingsley

Except a living man, there is nothing more wonderful than a book.

Thomas Mann

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

I think that Poe is so resonant because he represents that part of us that is in misery or sorrowful or wants to explore the darkness. He wrote a great story called 'The Imp of the Perverse' about the instinct towards self-destruction. Poe is the godfather of Goth literature and that whole movement.

Henry James

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

Robert Louis Stevenson

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.

Writing Family
Joseph Gordon-Levitt

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

Mao Zedong

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Vladimir Nabokov

There is only one school of literature - that of talent.

Gertrude Stein

Hemingway's remarks are not literature.

Vladimir Nabokov

Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.

Eudora Welty

What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set the most high.

Aldous Huxley

Every man's memory is his private literature.

Colin Jost

I majored in the history and literature of Russia and Britain. It has not helped my career.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

Washington Irving

The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible.

T. S. Eliot

I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.

Religion Politics
Keira Knightley

Well, the thing about great fictional characters from literature, and the reason that they're constantly turned into characters in movies, is that they completely speak to what makes people human.

Jordan Peterson

The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.

Jorge Luis Borges

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.

Wallace Stevens

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

John Legend

I was an English major in college who concentrated in African-American literature and culture. So I read quite a few slave narratives and stories of escape, and I grew up in Ohio, which was a common stop on the Underground Railroad.

D. H. Lawrence

Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

Rita Mae Brown

Don't ask to live in tranquil times. Literature doesn't grow there.

Don DeLillo

If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

Shah Rukh Khan

There's a whole form of literature in India which talks about the quest for the perfect man by a woman, where every woman looks for a perfect man but only ends up with half that.

Hermann Hesse

It is not Kafka's fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature.

T. S. Eliot

We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.

Religion
Wallace Stevens

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.

Henry Miller

What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.

George Santayana

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

Billy Joel

More than art, more than literature, music is universally accessible.

Charles Baudelaire

In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.

Gertrude Stein

Remarks are not literature.

Helen Keller

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

Hermann Hesse

Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.

Charles Bukowski

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

Life Writing
D. H. Lawrence

Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!

Robert Louis Stevenson

The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.

Julia Roberts

I think enough cannot be said for what you can discover through literature. So I think that was probably my most valued characteristic as a teenager.

Gertrude Stein

Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.

Jordan Peterson

The literature associating inequality with social instability and poor health outcomes is pretty convincing.

My father is a poet. He's a literary giant of this country - writes in Hindi - and also quite unique because he has a Ph.D. in English Literature. He taught at Harvard University, which is one of the most prominent universities in the country.

Virginia Woolf

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

Writing
Shia LaBeouf

Literature is an easier way to study acting, because then you can take any kind of spin.

Acting
Vladimir Putin

I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much.

If you're trying to learn how to act from a class, you're analyzing the teachers' movements and their intricacies, and it becomes like a pantomime of you wanting to be them, and that's wrong. Literature is an easier way to study acting, because then you can take any kind of spin. It's your own imagination, and your own version of it.

Before I was reading science fiction, I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel that said not everything ends well. It was one of those times where reading has meant a great deal to me, in terms of my development – an insight came from that book.