Literature Quotes

"I think Ill be a clown when I get grown.. Yes, sir, a clown. There aint one thing in this world I can do about folks except laugh, so Im gonna join the circus and laugh my head off Im gonna stand in the middle of the ring and laugh at the folks. Just looka yonder, every one of em oughta be ridin a broomstick."

"When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign -- a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don't want to hear the word mentioned."

"Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur ''Thou still unravished bride of quietness,'' then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary."

"Literature, as a field of glory, is an arena where a tomb may be more easily found than laurels; and as a means of support, it is the chance of chances."

"With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed."

"In literature, as in love, we are astonished at the choice made by other people."

"The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programs; or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold."

"One of the main purposes is to explain why the studies found in the literature have such divergent results."

"Literature becomes the living memory of a nation."

"A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature."

"Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society . . . loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read."

"Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart."

"Literature and Society in the First Modern Period, 321 B.C. - A.D. 235,"

"We are trying to teach literature and literacy in a society which doesn't value it any more."

"In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read."

"The only privilege literature deserves - and this privilege it requires in order to exist - is the privilege of being in the arena of discourse, the place where the struggle of our languages can be acted out."

"I'm thinking of reading something by chef Paul Prudhomme. It's a reading of all kinds of Southern literature."

"The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it"

"The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive."

"This is a book written by someone obsessed, stricken and deeply loving. There is nothing like it in literature."