quotations about literature
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
Curiosities of Literature
Sanity -- that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
preface, Poems
Be not merely a man of letters! Let literature be an honorable augmentations to your arms, not constitute the coat or fill the escutcheon!
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
Biographia Literaria
What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And -- though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports ... what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing.
V. S. NAIPAUL
Reading & Writing
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.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
letter to Horatio Bridge, Mar. 15, 1851
In general it will perhaps be found that persons devoted to mere literature commonly become devoted to mere idleness. They wish to produce a great work, but they find they cannot. Having relinquished everything to devote themselves to this, they conclude on trial that this is impossible. They wish to write, but nothing occurs to them. Therefore they write nothing, and they do nothing. As has been said, they have nothing to do. Their life has no events, unless they are very poor. With any decent means of subsistence, they have nothing to rouse them from an indolent and musing dream. A merchant must meet his bills, or he is civilly dead and uncivilly remembered. But a student may know nothing of time and be too lazy to wind up his watch.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
"I Am Afraid", A Soviet Heretic
Literary revolution and revolutionary literature did not create a beautiful new world but instead divested literature of its basic nature, promoted violence, and, by resorting to linguistic violence, made a battlefield of this domain of spiritual freedom.
GAO XINGJIAN
"Literature as Testimony: The Search for Truth", Witness Literature: Proceedings of the Nobel Centennial Symposium
It is with literature as with law or empire -- an established name is an estate in tenure, or a throne in possession.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"Letter to Mr. B--"
For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.
DORIS LESSING
A Proper Marriage
The finer literature, indeed, is characterized by a certain suffusion of the feminine flavor, the finer, the more ideal, thought plumed with sentiment; even science loves to spring from its feet, philosophy affect the clouds to inspire and edify.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
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
Commonplace Book
I realized the amazing power of literature and of the human imagination generally: to make the dead live and to stop the living from dying.
IVAN KLIMA
Love and Garbage
The literary world is fueled by pretension. People buy books because they love literature. But they also buy books because they like to seem clever and educated. They like to waltz around town with New Yorker tote bags, go to literary festivals and leave Penguin Classics casually lying around the house for visitors to see.
JAMES MARRIOTT
"The novel is in deep trouble--and only pretension can save it", The Times, August 31, 2018
Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1930
Literary history is the great morgue where all seek the dead ones whom they love, or to whom they are related.
HEINRICH HEINE
Scintillations from the Prose Works of Heinrich Heine
The literary gift is a mere accident--is as often bestowed on idiots who have nothing to say worth hearing as it is denied to strenuous sages.
MAX BEERBOHM
Letters of Max Beerbohm, 1892-1956
My wife has a beastly habit of comparing poetry -- all literature in fact -- to the droppings of the goats among the rocks -- mere excreta that fertilises the ground it falls on.
D. H. LAWRENCE
letter to Edward Marsh, November 18, 1913
Literature ... as a field for glory, is an arena where a tomb may be more easily found than laurels; as a means of support it is the very chance of chances.
HENRY GILES
Lectures and Essays
Even the choicest literature should be taken as the condiment, and not as the sustenance of life. It should be neither the warp nor the woof of existence, but only the flowery edging upon its borders.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts