Literature - Quotes

[Literature is] a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts. - Julian Barnes

A piece of literature can be many things but first of all it must capture its audience. You need to seduce people, entice them into a world of beauty and horror, light and shadow, of passion, of romance, of mystery. That's the magic of it. Beyond that, of course, you can open a dialogue about the ideas which interest you, but first of all you absolutely must get inside people's minds. - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

All literature is but a word – a thought – a maxim amplified. - Edward Counsel

An interchange of literature is the conversation of nations. - Edward Counsel

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives. - Neil Gaiman

For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment. - Matthew Arnold

It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel. - Salman Rushdie

It’s in literature that true life can be found. It’s under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth. - Gao Xingjian

Literature is a great staff, but a very sorry crutch. - Sir Walter Scott

Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none. - Jules Renard

Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed. - John Steinbeck

Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress. It deepens our natural sensibilities, and strengthens by exercise our intellectual capacities. It stores up the accumulated experience of the race, connecting Past and Present into a conscious unity; and with this store it feeds successive generations, to be fed in turn by them. - George Henry Lewes

Literature is like a subtle concoction of laboriously collected peripherals called words, intellect, thoughts, imagination, creativity and aestheticism brewed together to form a resplendent work of art. - Shilpa Sandesh

Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history. - Octavio Paz

Literature is the expression of the thoughts of society. Books are specimens of the conversations of an age, preserved in the spirit of taste and of genius. - Professor Huxley

Literature is the garden of wisdom. - James Ellis

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. - Fernando Pessoa

Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way. - Salman Rushdie

Literature is the voice of the age and the state; the character, energy, and resources of the country are reflected and imaged forth in the conceptions of its great minds; they are organs of the time; they speak not their own language, they scarce think their own thoughts; but under an impulse like the prophetic enthusiasm of old, they must feel and utter the sentiments which society inspires. - Edward Everett

Literature: The art of putting old words into new places. - Edward Blanchard

Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do – it can make us identify with situations and people far away. If it does that, it's a miracle. - Chinua Achebe

Originality in literature is only a new coat of paint on an old house. - Austin O’Malley

People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself. - Doris Lessing

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The advantage of literature over life is that its characters are clearly defined, and act consistently. - Jerome K. Jerome

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean. - Robert Louis Stevenson

The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said. - Jorge Luis Borges

There is such a thing as literary fashion, and prose and verse have been regulated by the same caprice that cuts our coats and cocks our hats. - Isaac Disraeli

We read literature for a number of reasons, but two of the most compelling ones are to get out of ourselves and our own life stories and – especially important – to find ourselves by understanding our own life stories more clearly in the context of others. - Maureen Corrigan

When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young. - Maya Angelou

While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living. - Cyril Connolly