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1
A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.
Virginia Woolf
Literature
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2
A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Literature
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3
A literary movement consists of five or six people who live in the same town and hate each other cordially.
George Moore
Literature
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4
A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.
Edith Hamilton
Literature
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5
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.
Ernest Hemingway
Literature
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6
All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it. Many of the so-called politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently . Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness.
Ernest Hemingway
Literature
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7
Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing -- he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.
Lionel Trilling
Literature
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8
Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.
Oscar Wilde
Literature
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9
As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.
Wallace Stevens
Literature
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10
By and large the literature of a democracy will never exhibit the order, regularity, skill, and art characteristic of aristocratic literature; formal qualities will be neglected or actually despised. The style will often be strange, incorrect, overburdened, and loose, and almost always strong and bold. Writers will be more anxious to work quickly than to perfect details. Short works will be commoner than long books, wit than erudition, imagination than depth. There will be a rude and untutored vigor of thought with great variety and singular fecundity. Authors will strive to astonish more than to please, and to stir passions rather than to charm taste.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Literature
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11
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
Milan Kundera
Literature
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12
For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.
Herman Melville
Literature
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13
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Ezra Pound
Literature
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14
Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that
Virginia Woolf
Literature
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15
How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
Wallace Stevens
Literature
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16
How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
Ernest Hemingway
Literature
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17
I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.
Edith Wharton
Literature
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18
I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.
Václav Havel
Literature
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19
If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
Ezra Pound
Literature
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20
If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Literature
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21
If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor.
W. H. Auden
Literature
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22
If you look at history you'll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict.
Desiderius Erasmus
Literature
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23
In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.
George Bernard Shaw
Literature
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24
In literature, as in love, we are astonished at the choice made by other people.
André Maurois
Literature
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25
In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.
Northrop Frye
Literature
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26
It is a good lesson --though it may often be a hard one --for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world's dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of all significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Literature
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27
It is the story-teller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.
Graham Greene
Literature
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28
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
Henry James
Literature
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29
Leisure without literature is death and burial alive.
Seneca the Younger
Literature
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30
Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
Gaston Bachelard
Literature
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31
Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.
Oscar Wilde
Literature
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32
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
Iris Murdoch
Literature
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33
Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.
Ezra Pound
Literature
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34
Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.
Paul de Man
Literature
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35
Literature flourishes best when it is half trade and half an art.
William Ralph Inge
Literature
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36
Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.
Cesare Pavese
Literature
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37
Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.
D. H. Lawrence
Literature
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38
Literature is analysis after the event.
Doris Lessing
Literature
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39
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
Helen Keller
Literature
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40
Literature is news that stays news.
Ezra Pound
Literature
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41
Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.
Jorge Luis Borges
Literature
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42
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
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43
Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
Lionel Trilling
Literature
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44
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
Thornton Wilder
Literature
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45
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.
Salman Rushdie
Literature
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46
Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.
Roland Barthes
Literature
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47
Literature must become party literature. Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat.
Vladimir Lenin
Literature
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48
Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers -- such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a fa?ade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Literature
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49
Literature... is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most reliable of terms in which man names and transforms himself.
Paul de Man
Literature
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50
Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Wallace Stevens
Literature
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51
Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later. A man can be a Fascist or a Communist and if his outfit gets in he can get to be an ambassador or have a million copies of his books printed by the Government or any of the other rewards the boys dream about.
Ernest Hemingway
Literature
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52
Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!
D. H. Lawrence
Literature
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53
One learns little more about a man from his feats of literary memory than from the feats of his alimentary canal.
Frank Moore Colby
Literature
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54
One of the proud joys of the man of letters --if that man of letters is an artist is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world's memory.
Literature
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55
Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.
André Gide
Literature
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56
Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
Sinclair Lewis
Literature
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57
People do not deserve to have good writings; they are so pleased with the bad.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Literature
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58
Perversity is the muse of modern literature.
Susan Sontag
Literature
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59
Remarks are not literature.
Gertrude Stein
Literature
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60
Speak of the moderns without contempt, and of the ancients without idolatry.
Earl of Chesterfield
Literature
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61
That is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?
Arthur Miller
Literature
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62
The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
Ezra Pound
Literature
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63
The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.
William Faulkner
Literature
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64
The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
George Orwell
Literature
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65
The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.
Václav Havel
Literature
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66
The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Literature
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67
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
Oscar Wilde
Literature
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68
The existence of good bad literature --the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously --is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.
George Orwell
Literature
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69
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.
Lionel Trilling
Literature
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70
The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
Jean Cocteau
Literature
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71
The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.
Ernest Hemingway
Literature
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72
The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected.
Salman Rushdie
Literature
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73
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.
Salman Rushdie
Literature
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74
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
Literature
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75
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.
Milan Kundera
Literature
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76
The self-styled intellectual who is impotent with pen and ink hungers to write history with sword and blood.
Eric Hoffer
Literature
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77
The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
Italo Calvino
Literature
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78
There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
Ernest Hemingway
Literature
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79
There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
Thomas Carlyle
Literature
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80
What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.
Henry Miller
Literature
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81
When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball.
Raymond Chandler
Literature
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82
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.
Italo Calvino
Literature
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83
When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behavior by his attitude towards the result of the behavior arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way.
T. S. Eliot
Literature
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84
Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!
Luigi Pirandello
Literature
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85
With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Literature
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86
Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.
Jules Renard
Literature
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