What Is Literature Quotes: top 90 famous quotes about What Is Literature

What Is Literature Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational What Is Literature quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints. — James Joyce

What we call life is only talk of nature. — Dejan Stojanovic

Literature is the power of fiction itself: not making a claim about what the world is, but about the imagination of a possible world. — Claire Colebrook

Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that? — Kurt Vonnegut

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote. — E. M. Forster

Taste is to literature what bon ton is in society. — Madame De Stael

Literature: proclaiming in front of everyone what one is careful to conceal from one's immediate circle — Jean Rostand

I've been asked what differentiates war literature as a category, and I don't think there is anything. — Phil Klay

The idiot willingness to choose sides is what feeds the abattoir of history. — Steven Heighton

You stand for what is right-
for the patient and the staff.
Pressures of work may down you,
maybe bent but not broken. — Mujel Hasan

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other. — Siri Hustvedt

Those are the two things: a sense of loving and being loved, and being creative - that is what life is made up of, and what literature reminds us of. — Robert Dessaix

I think it is an important question of our lives - what is the meaning of literature to us as humans. — Robert Dessaix

What good literature can do and does do - far greater than any importation of morality - is touch the human soul. — Karen Swallow Prior

What distinguishes pulp fiction from great literature is how emphatically the work challenges us to interpret it. — Bruce Meyer

I prefer unlucky things. Luck is vulgar. Who wants what luck would bring? I don't. — D.H. Lawrence

The unusual is only found in a very small percentage, except in literary creations, and that is exactly what makes literature. — Julio Cortazar

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. — Italo Calvino

Roy: The immutable heart of what we are that bleeds through whatever we might become. All else is vanity. — Tony Kushner

The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature. — C.S. Lewis

Literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic. — Northrop Frye

It is now only in letters I write what I feel: not in literature any more, and I seldom say it, because I keep trying to be amusing. — E. M. Forster

In literature, as in Life, one is often astonished by what is chosen by others. — Andre Malraux

Our job as a writer is to represent the world and to bear witness to it. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Our desire to say more grows bigger and what to say about it, except that saying is not always about saying, growing is not always about growing. — Dejan Stojanovic

Life and literature is a question of what one thrills to, and further than that no man shall ever go without putting his foot in a turd. — Philip Larkin

What makes up a life; events or the recollection of events?
How much of recollection is invention?
Whose invention? — Jeanette Winterson

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. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Ideas are to literature what light is to painting. — Paul Bourget

Snowflake's journey is a metaphor. A metaphor for what, exactly?
I have no freaking clue. — Special Snowflake

In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others. — Andre Maurois

But if what can exist does exist, is memory invention or is invention memory? — Jeanette Winterson

What is life but a fucked-up factory fabricating fuckups? — Jorge Enrique Ponce

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

The sign of a good novel is what it can cause its reader to see, even if this lies beyond the author's own vision. — John Gaddis

A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is. — Jeanette Winterson

What a tribute this is to art; what a misfortune this is for history.
(In reference to Shakespeare's 'Richard III') — Paul Murray Kendall

What is well done, I feel as if I did; what is ill-done, I reck not of. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering. — Harold Bloom

What great literature does best is to show us those moments which make life worth living. — Marty Rubin

Scarcely anything in literature is worth a damn except what is written between the lines. — Raymond Chandler

What good is a writer if he can't destroy literature? And us ... what good are we if we don't help as much as we can in that destruction? — Julio Cortazar

Let the colours of your ideas are red so that all can easily notice them! And what is red? Red is scream, red is power, red is assertion! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

One of my rules is never to look sideways at what other people are doing but instead, do what I feel is right. — Annie Bryant

When a man can observe himself suffering and is able, later, to describe what he's gone through, it means he was born for literature. — Edouard Bourdet

Thoughts are meant to be words and words are meant to be written and what is written becomes a figment of the literature — Shilpa Sandesh

What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature? — Rex Stout

A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind! — Joseph Conrad

Reason is not what decides love. — Moliere

No, Ben. What I'm asking is: Are you the vehicle, and Georgie rides around in you? That is why Ben's the driver, right? — Jonathan Harnisch

The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

All literature is a footnote to Faust. I have no idea what I mean by that. — Woody Allen

The creation by word-power of something out of nothing
what is that but magic? And, may I add, what is that but literature? — Aldous Huxley

Woolf is an important writer for me, someone I read often and who forms part of my ideal of what literature can do. — Garth Greenwell

In autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe — Salman Rushdie

Literature is what words evoke in the reader. — Karl Ove Knausgard

What is literature compared with cooking? The one is shadow, the other is substance. — E. V. Lucas

Nor is the limitation of what is sayable a limit to the doable: this last is the possibility of literature. — Carlos Fuentes

Asian literature is evolving with the people. It's always a reflection on what's happening to the culture at large. — Kevin Kwan

If what I write is literature, I guess you'd better emphasize the 'litter.' — Lydia Lunch

What makes Geoffrey Chaucer such compelling reading is his creation of a riveting conversation between the ideal and the everyday. — John Mark Reynolds

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. — Annie Dillard

One of my major preoccupations is the approximation between what I say and what I do, between what I seem to be and what I am actually becoming. — Paulo Freire

Literature is what intelligent people have instead of dope. — Patrick Hemingway

And what is gossip anyway?Just fragments of sad accounts, maneuvered and mutilated year after year for our sinful pleasure. — Kanza Javed

What is this thing? trading passions for a tiny bit of acceptance. — Charlotte Eriksson

I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company. — Anita Brookner

When I read, it is not acted literature; but what I write is written acting. — Karl Kraus

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

Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I get upset about what is taken as great literature and what is cute and exotic. — Rabih Alameddine

Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next? — Karen Thompson Walker

What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books. — A.S. Byatt

I have always been an avid reader of chemical literature, eager for what is new. — Yves Chauvin

Plot is to literature what individual holes are to miniature golf. — Stanley Elkin

Nothing is inanimate; what is the rest is our interpretation. — Dejan Stojanovic

...for most men are unaware that what is in the power of magicians to accomplish, that the heart can also accomplish by dint of love and bravery. — Joseph Bedier

What lasts is what is written. We look to literature to find the essence of an age. — Peter Brodie

Actually, I am a coward. I say only what is safe to say, and I criticise only what is permissable to criticise. — Murong Xuecun

If you are only what you are,
You at least have a chance
Not to outsmart,
But be on a par with yourself
And that is worth trying. — Dejan Stojanovic

The eyesight for an eagle is what thought is to a man. — Dejan Stojanovic

Literature is what's left standing after the storm. — Mark Rude

We're supposed to see "universal" love as heterosexual. What I insist upon in my work is that there is no such thing as universal love in literature. — Audre Lorde

In literature, too, it is not great achievement to memorize what you have read while not formulating an opinion of your own. — Epictetus

Real geniuses would like that what we think of ourselves is true. — Dejan Stojanovic

For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class - contemporary literature is what's most useful. — Alan Lightman

I think literature is best when it's voicing what we would prefer not to talk about. — Rick Moody

The difficulty is not to write, but to write what you mean. — Robert Louis Stevenson

What they achieved in art and literature is familiar to everybody, but what they did in the purely intellectual realm is even more exceptional. — Anonymous

What is a magazine? A small body of Literature entirely surrounded by advertisements. — Carolyn Wells