Literature Quotes

My books are shelved in different places, depending on the bookstore. Sometimes they can be found in the Mystery section, sometimes in the Humor department, and occasionally even in the Literature aisle, which is somewhat astounding.

~ Carl Hiaasen

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

~ John Updike

Language as a communication tool is the primary element from which literature is created. Even in pre-literate societies, it exists as songs, riddles, or epics that are chanted.

~ F. Sionil José

But picketing - picketing for or against something, and handing out literature - these are conspicuously formal actions. They have to be understood as indirect communication.

~ Tony Conrad

When they were done downloading all the information off each hard drive, they took all the computers, all the literature, and loaded everything into a big white truck and left.

~ Sherman Austin

The knowledge of languages was very useful. I have a university degree in foreign languages and literature.

~ Emma Bonino

At graduation, I assumed I'd be in publishing, but first I went to England and got a master's degree in English Literature. And then I came back to New York and had a series of publishing jobs, the way one does.

~ Joseph Kanon

Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

~ Paul Valéry

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.

~ J. G. Ballard

I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else.

~ Haruki Murakami

In my teens, I developed a passionate idolatry for a teacher of English literature. I wanted to do something that he would approve of more, so I thought I should be some sort of a scholar.

~ Trevor Nunn

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

~ Stephen Leacock

Music enriches people's lives in the same way paintings and literature do. Everybody deserves that.

~ Victoria Wood

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

~ Raymond Chandler

Two of my three siblings are older, so I suppose I learned from them and became a very avid reader at a young age, which I think enough cannot be said for what you can discover through literature.

~ Julia Roberts

Where I grew up in Vermont, there is no municipal garbage removal. You have to bring your trash to the dump every weekend. Something like three hours on Saturday morning, the entire town goes in. It is actually a very efficient place to do politics. I would go to the garbage dump, get petitions signed, give out literature, talk to voters.

~ Robby Mook

Novelists get to say plenty in their massive tomes; rock singers only get four-minute songs with two verses and a chorus' worth of lyrics, and so there's a real pleasure in accessing the intelligence behind the music, even if it doesn't qualify as 'great literature.'

~ Karan Mahajan

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

Istanbul is inspiring because it has its own code of architecture, literature, poetry, music.

~ Christian Louboutin

I worked out a rather deep-dish theory defining the theater as a form of architecture rather than a form of literature.

~ Preston Sturges

The 20th century is a period defined by cultural and artistic movements. However, the 21st century creative-scape that we occupy now doesn't really have movements in the same way. Instead it's made up of diverse individuals working across various platforms simultaneously; art, architecture, film, music and literature.

~ Doug Aitken

Few are there that will leave the secure seclusion of the scholar's life, the peaceful walks of literature and learning, to stand out a target for the criticism of unkind and hostile minds.

~ Felix Adler

You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.

~ Richard Dawkins

I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.

~ T. S. Eliot

Without the emotion of the beautiful, the sublime, the mysterious, there is no art, no religion, no literature.

~ John Burroughs

I studied English literature; I took 2 independent religion classes, but I wasn't a religion major really.

~ Maggie Gyllenhaal

There are even more statues of Robert Burns than of any other figure in world literature. Indeed if we discount figures of religion, then only Christopher Columbus has more statues than he worldwide.

~ Len G. Murray

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

~ Henry James

The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.

~ Terry Eagleton

The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.

~ Daniel J. Boorstin

For this reason, to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one's literary education very incomplete.

~ Lafcadio Hearn

I have never worked on interrogation; I have never seen an interrogation, and I have only a passing knowledge of the literature on interrogation. With that qualification, my opinion is that the point of interrogation is to get at the truth, not to get at what the interrogator wants to hear.

~ Martin Seligman

Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.

~ Thomas Bulfinch

Bobby Fischer has an enormous knowledge of chess and his familiarity with the chess literature of the USSR is immense.

~ Boris Spassky

Personal experience is the basis of all real Literature.

~ George Henry Lewes

The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Mention the gothic, and many readers will probably picture gloomy castles and an assortment of sinister Victoriana. However, the truth is that the gothic genre has continued to flourish and evolve since the days of Bram Stoker, producing some of its most interesting and accomplished examples in the 20th century - in literature, film and beyond.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

In the non-Greek stories, Persia, Egypt, even China, Central Asia, in oral traditions and written literature, anyone who fights Amazons admires their courage and beauty, and they want to be allies of the Amazon; they don't wanna kill them.

~ Adrienne Mayor

The genre has moved into this commercial aspect of itself, and ignored this extraordinarily rich literature that's filed everywhere else except under travel.

~ Robyn Davidson

A lot of my stories are inspired by Japanese folklore or literature or movies: I've done stories based on Kabuki and Noh plays, and on Kurosawa's 'Yojimbo' movies.

~ Stan Sakai