Literature Quotes

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

~ Toni Morrison

If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.

~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

I will always know the glory of the beautiful and rare, as they will know security from labour and prayer. As they will hear the laughter of the children they gave life, I will know the torments of the song born under knife.

~ Roman Payne

He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean--except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down.

~ Julian Barnes

If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally.

~ George Eliot

Perfection seems sterile; it is final, no mystery in it; it's a product of an assembly line.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

Life itself has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become displaced, fantastic, familiar-unfamiliar. This is why it is so logical for literature today to be drawn to the fantastic plot, or to the amalgam of reality and fantasy. (The New Russian Prose)

~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

In trying to be perfect, He perfected the art of anonymity, Became imperceptible And arrived nowhere from nowhere.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

Gormenghast. Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracts. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet beats away from a choked river. Deep in a fist of stone a doll's hand wriggles, warm rebellious on the frozen palm. A shadow shifts its length. A spider stirs... And darkness winds between the characters.- Gormenghast

~ Mervyn Peake

The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.

~ Gustave Flaubert

We love the imperfect shapes in nature and in the works of art, look for an intentional error as a sign of the golden key and sincerity found in true mastery.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

Sound unbound by nature becomes bounded by art.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

It's true that a picture is worth a thousand words, but it's also true that a word is worth a thousand pictures.

~ Marty Johncox

I am in favour of illusion, not alienation... Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present moment and imprison the spectator in it. The theatre apes the profound truth that we are extended beings who yet can only exist in the present.

~ Iris Murdoch

Art is the medium through which new thoughts, perspectives, and attitudes are brought into the world.

~ James Rozoff

There has never been any art or literature without drink and there never will be....Unless something is done about the matter [prohibition] this country is going to the dogs. There has been no development in our art or literature for 30 or 40 years.

~ Joseph Pennell

Art doesn’t give rise to anything in us that isn’t already there. It simply stirs our curious consciousness and sparks a fire that illuminates who we have always wanted to be.

~ Kamand Kojouri

It was held that the six great arts – visual art (including architecture and photography), drama, dance, music, film and literature – form a family of related, if largely autonomous, practices: they all work through the aesthetic, all address the imagination, and all are concerned with the symbolic embodiment of human meaning.

~ Peter Abbs

The artist tries to show reason in experience and appearance – and lyric is the daily appearance, the commonplace dress, of reason. It shows us the rational. It makes the epic pattern human. It's the footprint on the pathway. In the epic-lyric the individual and particular are no longer isolated but are placed in a historical, social, human pattern. That's why there's a political way of cutting bread or wearing shoes.

~ Edward Bond

Therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he been believes.

~ J.m. Coetzee

The riskiness of Art, the reason why it affects us, is not the riskiness of its subject matter, it is the risk of creating a new way of seeing, a new way of thinking.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Be a good reader first, if you wish to become a good writer.

~ Pawan Mishra

Poetry isn’t an island, it is the bridge. Poetry isn’t a ship, it is the lifeboat. Poetry isn’t swimming. Poetry is water.

~ Kamand Kojouri

There is so much in the world for us if we only have the eyes to see it, and the heart to love it, and the hand to gather it ourselves- so much in men and women, so much in art and literature, so much everywhere in which to delight, and for which to be thankful for.

~ L.m. Montgomery

The notion of cause and effect is sometimes useful in real life, and it can even be interesting in art, but I'm more interested in cause and cause or effect and effect or and and and.

~ Kevin Mcpherson Eckhoff

It is a dangerous thing to substitute reading or writing for living. Live first, then write.

~ Kamand Kojouri

There is no revelation in my words. I am merely stating what others have forgotten to write down.

~ Kamand Kojouri

In the flailing light they all looked sharp-edged and ethereal and divided by great distances

~ Virginia Woolf

...human beings are able to attend to issues longer, to think harder about them, to receive deeper impressions that last longer, if information is presented in a context of emotion--a sort of hot dressing--than if it is presented wholly without affect.

~ Mette Hjort

We are all born as storytellers. Our inner voice tells the first story we ever hear.

~ Kamand Kojouri

It is the duty of every generation of writers and artists to find fresh ways of expressing the habitual circumstances of the human condition. To serve up the lukewarm remains of yesterdays dinner is easy, profitable and popular, (for a while). It is also wrong.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Because at nightwhen others are sleeping, I drown myself in poetry.

~ Kamand Kojouri

linear brains can't curve a thought.

~ Douglas M Laurent

And someday,when the partiesdon’t dazzle you anymore,and when the alcohol failsto amuse your senses,come to me.We’ll lie on the grass,stare at the stars,and talk about Life.Maybe I will become the Momentyou rediscover yourself again.

~ Meraaqi

Maybe stories choose how they are told and who tells them.

~ Kamand Kojouri

When we create, we become stronger. When we create, we feel better. When we create, we can use our own two hands to create a new world. And this new world will be as we want it to be.

~ Valentina Knurova

In some way, every creative action disturbs the universe.

~ E.l. Konigsburg

As the philosopher Gilles Deleuze put it, no painter ever stands before a completely blank canvas, no author ever sits before a blank page. In fact, the surface confronting the modern artist is full of inherited images that must first be cleared from the imagination before one can begin to create one's own.

~ Marie Luise Knott

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium

~ Oscar Wilde

Horror is the law of the world of living creatures, and civilization is concerned with masking that truth. Literature and art refine and beautify, and if they were to depict reality naked, just as everyone suspects it is (although we defend ourselves against that knowledge), no one would be able to stand it.

~ Czesław Miłosz